SumUp Adds Spanish Bank BBVA To Its Latest Groupon/AmEx Round, Follows Mobile Payment Rival iZettle To Latin America As mobile payments company Square looks to online commerce for the next chapter of its growth with Square Market, its rivals in Europe continue to push geographical boundaries into the New World. Today, Germany’s SumUp announced that it will start to offer its payment service in South America, with the initiative fuelled by new, strategic investment from BBVA Ventures, the VC arm of Spanish banking giant BBVA. SumUp is not yet announcing its first countries but co-founder and CMO Stefan Jeschonnek says that they expect to go live by the end of this year. The amount of the investment is undisclosed. SumUp’s news today follows an announcement from iZettle, another one of the mobile payment hopefuls, who has also raised money from a Spanish bank, Santader, and also plans to use the investment to tackle South America. It seems that competition among payment startups is matched by that among Spanish conquistador banks. BBVA’s investment is an extension of SumUp’s funding round announced at the end of May that also included Groupon and American Express. The total of that bigger round has also been left vague: Jeschonnek tells us that it’s in the range of “double-digit euros” but will not say whether that it is more or less than the $20 million+ in funding it raised when it first launched in August 2012. To date, SumUp’s named investors now include b-to-v Partners, Shortcut Ventures, Tengelmann Ventures and Klaus Hommels, the early Skype, Facebook and Xing investor, in addition to Groupon, AmEx and BBVA. It has also in part been bootstrapped by its founders, which include Daniel Klein, SumUp’s CEO, who was also one of the founders of PayPal competitor MoneyBookers (later rebranded as Skrill). Jeschonnek says that the iZettle comparison — both picking up Spanish banks as backers, both tackling Latin America — is more coincidence than intentional. “They approached us, and we’ve been having an ongoing discussion,” he says. That included a “deep due dilligence process that took several months that preceded the investment.” BBVA has made other investments into startups that target the small and medium business sector, including participation in a $12.4 million round for business intelligence specialist Radius earlier this year, and a subsequent venture round in May for an undisclosed amount. Indeed, there are a number of reasons why South America is an attractive target for companies like SumUp, iZettle and Payleven, another mobile payments startup incubated by Rocket Internet and tcrn.ch/12UR1C9 #Tech #Technology #News #Updates #Like #Follow #Comment
Posted on: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 07:08:18 +0000
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