This week, some of the more notable funding rounds included sizeable capital raises for a New Delhi fintech and two European companies, indicating investors ever increasing interest in making headway into Asian and EU markets. Here are the Bank Automation News highlights.

Pine Labs

New Delhi-based Pine Labs, a cloud-based merchant commerce platform, announced Tuesday a $600 million investment round. Participating in the round were new investors Fidelity Management and Research Company, and funds managed by BlackRock and Ishana, among others.

“Consumer payments, especially in Asia, is extremely competitive, but the valuation is high, showing the success and increased volumes of digital payments, also the importance going forward,” Stephen Greer, senior analyst at research and advisory firm Celent, told BAN.

Pine Labs is backed by Sequoia Capital, Temasek Holdings, Actis, PayPal and Mastercard and other global investors. “The backing by Mastercard and PayPal shows strong support for infrastructure to support banking capabilities,” Greer added.

“Over the last year, Pine Labs has made significant progress in its offline to online strategy in India and the direct-to-consumer play in Southeast Asia,” B. Amrish Rau, chief executive of Pine Labs, said in a statement. “Our full-stack approach to payments and merchant commerce has allowed us to grow in-month merchant partnerships by nearly 100% over the last year.”

bunq

Amsterdam-based challenger bank bunq on Thursday announced a capital raise of $228 million, bringing the fintech’s valuation to $1.9 billion. The current funding round is the largest Series A raise ever secured by a European fintech, according to a press release from the company. Pollen Street Capital led the raise with bunq founder Ali Niknam, investing $29.5 million in the round.

“The digital execution capability of bunq and the ‘customers first’ approach” is what attracted investors to the company,” Kathelijn de Bruijne, bunq head of expansion, told BAN. “The cash will be used for further expansion of bunq, plus now M&A will be incorporated in the growth strategy. We are hiring for growth across all departments.”

As part of the deal, bunq acquired Capitalflow Group, a privately held Irish lending company.

“It looks like they are close to profitability, which is critical to scale,” Celent’s Greer told BAN. He added that bunq is “hitting maturity” given the deposits, making it a smart move to use the funds to reinvest into the product.

Younited Credit

Younited Credit, a credit and payments platform, announced Thursday a $170 million funding raise that includes investment from Goldman Sachs Asset Management and Bridgepoint. Previous investors Eurazeo, Bpifrance Large Ventures and AG2R La Mondiale also participated in this current round for the Paris-based fintech.

The funds raised will be devoted to product innovation and expansion of its B2B solutions, including the launch of Younited Pay, a payment facility for European retailers and e-merchants, according to a Younited press release.

“This new significant equity round will allow us to invest heavily towards a more disruptive technology and data-driven product for the benefit of our clients and partners as we accelerate innovation,” said co-founder and CEO Charles Egly.

“Younited’s key proposition is the faster credit decisioning cycle and the enablement of fair and transparent P2P lending to support customer’s life events (travel, marriage, home buying) or business needs,” Ronak Doshi, vice president at research and consulting firm Everest Group, told BAN.

Pleo

Pleo, an expense-management tool and smart company cards fintech, announced on Monday a funding raise of $150 million, the largest Series C round for any Danish-headquartered company, according to Pleo. The current raise by Copenhagen-based fintech takes its valuation to $1.7 billion. The round was co-led by Bain Capital Ventures and Thrive Capital.

New funds will go to developing new spend management features for the platform, as well as to market expansion efforts and hiring, according to a company press release.

“Pleo is well-positioned to become the dominant player in small business spend management, an $80 billion-plus opportunity in Europe alone, and will only grow more essential to businesses as the company expands into bill payments in the near future,” Merritt Hummer, partner at Bain Capital Ventures, said in a statement.

Everest Group’s Doshi told BAN that the pandemic pushed small and medium businesses to digitalize and automate their billing, invoicing, payments, payroll, cash forecasting, and expense management functions. “Pleo is tapping into this demand signal to scale their platform that enables businesses to be more productive by using technology to manage the expense management functions and digitize several manual processes for the businesses.”

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