Card issuing platform Marqeta confirmed a $260 million Series E funding round to expand to new geographies, build more features and support new customer acquisition.
Hedge fund Coatue Management led the round, with participation from Vitruvian Partners, Spark Capital, Lone Pine and Geodesic. Existing investors include Visa, ICONIQ, Goldman Sachs, 83North, Granite Ventures, Commerz Ventures and CreditEase.
Marqeta, which counts as its customers large startups like Square, Affirm, Doordash and Instacart, is now valued at $2 billion. In an interview with Bank Innovation, chief revenue officer Omri Dahan said the funding would help the Oakland, California-based company expand its customer base to new markets and build its platform offerings. Marqeta’s platform can currently facilitate e-commerce, lending, disbursements, on-demand delivery, expense management and digital banking services.
“From a feature perspective, being able to offer credit, debit and prepaid processing on all continents is the focus,” Dahan said. “We do some of that in some places today, but we don’t do all of it, and where we do all of it, we don’t do it in all places. We do all of that in the U.S., but being able to bring that to Canada, the U.K. and the continent of Europe is a [priority].”
Marqeta isn’t yet ready to announce to which countries it will expand, but Dahan told Bank Innovation that the markets with significant growth opportunities include those in North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America. To support these efforts, the company will be expanding its engineering, marketing and sales teams.
Marqeta’s rapid growth is the result of the platform’s easy user experience and developer-friendly interface, said payments consultant David True. For example, the platform allows gig-economy startups like Doordash and Instacart to easily issue cards to employees making purchases or placing orders on the brand’s behalf, and it lets lending platforms like Affirm, Acima and Kabbage issue cards to individual and business customers.
“It’s about simplicity,” True said. “They’ve made it very easy to turn on card issuing, whereas in the past you would have to find a bank to work with you. With many of these new startups, they need good APIs and technology that’s easy to work with.”





