Chipper Cash cofounders Maijid Moujaled (left) and Ham Serunjogi
ETHAN PINES FOR FORBES
With more transactions moving online every single year, payments companies continue to be among fintech’s largest and fastest-growing businesses. One newcomer to our 2022 Fintech 50 list is San Francisco-based Chipper Cash, which aims to make money transfers cheaper and faster for Africans. Founded by two entrepreneurs from Uganda and Ghana, Chipper also lets consumers pay bills and invest in U.S. stocks, and it now has more than five million customers. Another newcomer is Melio, a New York startup that competes with Bill.com and lets companies pay their bills online. It targets smaller customers than Bill and has a different business model, charging a fee to expedite payments.
TripActions has created a $7.25 billion (valuation) company by bundling corporate cards with a travel and expense platform, taking on incumbents like Concur, and Stronghold has grown rapidly by offering payments processing to merchants in “high-risk” purchase categories like alcohol, cannabis and gaming.
Although publicly traded payments companies such as PayPal, Square and Marqeta have seen their stocks fall hard since last summer, the big shift from paper to digital payments still has a great deal of momentum and runway. Stripe, the largest private fintech in the world, grew its transaction volume in 2021 to $640 billion, up 60% from 2020.
Here are the six payments companies that made the Fintech 50 in 2022:
Chipper Cash
App that lets customers in five African countries, the U.S. and the U.K. pay bills, make cross-border money transfers and buy bitcoin. It earns revenue through foreign-exchange fees and crypto brokerage commissions. Chipper grew from roughly two million registered users in 2020 to more than five million by the end of 2021. One-third of its 350 employees are U.S.-based. (Read more about Chipper Cash.)
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Funding: $280 million from Deciens Capital, FTX Ribbit Capital and others
Latest valuation: $2.2 billion
Bona fides: Revenue grew from $18 million in 2020 to more than $75 million in 2021.
Cofounders: Ugandan native Ham Serunjogi, 28, is CEO; CTO Maijid Moujaled, 30, grew up in Ghana; the pair met at Grinnell College in Iowa.
Melio
Helps small businesses pay bills and get paid online, instead of through paper checks. Differentiating itself from larger competitor Bill.com, Melio targets tiny mom and pop shops whose owners often aren’t accounting savvy. It charges customers a 1% fee to expedite a same-day payment and a 2.9% fee to pay by credit card. Half of its employees and all of its customers are U.S.-based.
Headquarters: New York, New York
Funding: $506 million from Thrive Capital, Tiger Global Management, Coatue and others
Latest valuation: $4 billion
Bona fides: Is now processing about $2 billion a month, up from $600 million a year ago.
Cofounders: CEO Matan Bar, 37, who previously led peer-to-peer payments at PayPal; CTO Ilan Atias, 43; former COO Ziv Paz, 38.
Plaid
Helps fintech apps like Venmo and Coinbase connect to customers’ bank accounts, allowing consumers to make deposits and payments. In a bid to offer more features, earlier this year Plaid paid $250 million to acquire Cognito, an identity verification and KYC (know your customer) compliance provider.
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Funding: $735 million from Altimeter Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures and others
Latest valuation: $13.4 billion
Bona fides: Grew its customer base from about 4,500 in late 2020 to 6,300 by the end of 2021.
Cofounders: CEO Zach Perret, 34, and former CTO William Hockey, 32, the cofounder of new Fintech 50 member Column. The pair met as junior Bain consultants before founding Plaid in 2012.
Stripe
Its software lets companies ranging from tiny startups to Shopify and Instacart accept online payments and take out business loans, among other features. In 2021, it acquired a point-of-sale credit card reader manufacturer and launched a new service that lets customers automatically calculate and collect sales tax. (Read more about Stripe.)
Headquarters: San Francisco, California
Funding: $2.4 billion from Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global and others
Latest valuation: $95 billion, making it the most valuable private fintech
Bona fides: Processed $640 billion in payments in 2021, a 60% increase from 2020.
Cofounders: CEO Patrick Collison, 33, and president John Collison, 31, Irish-born brothers.
Stronghold
Payment processing startup lets companies like cannabis dispensaries, alcohol retailers and sports gaming sites accept payments online. In 2018, it minted its own cryptocurrency, SHX token, and today it distributes those tokens to customers as loyalty rewards.
Headquarters: Oakland, California
Funding: $6 million from Array VC, Freestyle VC, Precursor Ventures and others
Bona fides: Grew revenue from $1 million in 2020 to $7 million in 2021.
Cofounders: CEO Tammy Camp, 43, former head of growth at cryptocurrency Stellar; CTO Sean Bennett, 29, who previously cofounded crypto and compliance technology startups.
TripActions
Travel and expense software startup that caters to large companies and competes with Concur. It has its own corporate card, Liquid, which simplifies expense management and lets employers set custom spending limits for their employee cardholders. Revenue from its Liquid card comprises about 25% of TripActions’ total revenue–the rest comes from business lines like collecting sales commissions from hotels and airlines.
Headquarters: Palo Alto, California
Funding: $1.1 billion from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Capital, Zeev Ventures and others
Latest valuation: $7.25 billion
Bona fides: 9,000 total corporate customers, including Netflix, Adobe and Heineken, up from 3,600 at the end of 2020.
Cofounders: CEO Ariel Cohen, 46 and CTO Ilan Twig, 49. The Israeli-born executives are Hewlett-Packard veterans who previously cofounded StreamOnce, a business collaboration platform they sold in 2013.
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