Rapyd, a fintech-as-a-service platform through which businesses and consumers can pay or be paid as they choose for local and cross-border e-commerce, wants to be the Amazon AWS for financial services.

The London-based startup announced today the closing of a $40 million Series B funding round led by payments giant Stripe and VC firm General Catalyst, which is itself a large backer of Stripe. General Catalyst, in a statement, pointed to a growing market opportunity in global commerce and Rapyd’s unique position in that space.

Arik Shtilman, co-founder and CEO of Rapyd, told Bank Innovation the platform provides a full spec of services that allows companies to build any type of fintech or payment related solution on top of Rapyd, using a single API.

“It’s a complete platform B2B play, completely white-labeled, that essentially provides all the technological infrastructure and regulatory licenses required,” he said.

Shtilman said Rapyd’s opportunity lies in the fact that more than half of all transactions worldwide are facilitated by bank transfer, but merchants find it increasingly difficult to digitally enable local payment methods and process cross-border sales that fuel global expansion.

“This space is still heavily dominated by companies with very old technology and very old processes that basically turn any type of development for a product you want to launch in this market into a very complicated task,” Shtilman said. “Every single thing you might want to do turns into a project that takes months because either the compliance or the technology of the partner you select does not allow you to do what you actually want.”

He said Rapyd’s advantage is the ability for companies to go to market quickly with a new capability.

Shtilman said everything is going to the cloud and that this process will only accelerate across finance within the next five years.

“Three to five years from now, there will be just two or three dominating platforms that everyone will be building on top of very quickly, and no one will be trying to build his own brick and mortar solution,” he said.

Asked how Rapyd might become one of those platforms, Shtilman said the company has “a good lead on the market” with a simple, sophisticated cloud platform built from scratch over three years. He said many of the people on the team are cloud computing people, rather than payments people, in terms of their backgrounds. An aggressive global plan that quickly established their presence in well over 100 countries around the world also helped, he said.

The flexibility of the platform as well as the range of services offered is also a differentiator from other companies in all the spaces in which Rapyd operates, Shtilman said. In addition to payments services, Rapyd also provides realtime foreign exchange services, and global Know Your Customer (KYC), Anti-Money Laundering (AML)/Counter Financing Terrorism (CFT) services, among other capabilities.

The company, founded in 2015, plans to expand its cloud technology platform that supports any in-country or cross-border commerce use case requiring local payments, such as bank transfers, e-wallets, or cash for local acceptance and payouts. Shtilman did not elaborate on Stripe’s involvement in the latest funding round or what relationship the companies have.

The latest funding will be used to scale Rapyd as it seeks to grow its workforce and enter more global markets. Shtilman said the company currently has 100 employees and hopes to have 150 by the end of the year.

Rapyd currently has about 50 customers, of which about 20 are one of the top 500 companies in the world, Shtilman said. Declining to name names, he said Rapyd counts one of the biggest gig economy platforms and one of biggest e-commerce platforms among its global clients.

“We’re white-label, whereas a company like PayPal is very brand-oriented,” Shtilman said. “You’ll never see the Rapyd brand, and for some of the big players we’re working with, it’s really attractive for them because their brand is the one that dominates on the consumer side.”

Rapyd makes money like Amazon AWS, he said, by charging for every API usage. For instance, if a company uses the API to collect funds, Rapyd charges a transaction fee, and if a company uses it for ID verification, there’s a charge for every ID verified. 

Adam Valkin, partner of General Catalyst, in a statement that Rapyd is “well-positioned” in the digital commerce space with a platform that reduces friction in payments for businesses and consumers. “This market will continue to grow as countries around the world move towards real-time payments directly between merchants and banks, and consumers embrace branded wallet applications that offer broader services to help manage their money,” he continued.

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