Bogotá — Having been a success story in Colombia, where it was launched in 2002 and made electronic payments a reality, PayU has been bought out by Israeli unicorn Rapydto for $610 million.
PayU is a leading provider of payment solutions for corporates and SMEs in emerging markets, operating in more than 30 countries and serving 50 markets.
The deal, which excludes PayU’s operations in India, Turkey and Southeast Asia, consolidates Rapyd’s position as a global fintech leader, continuing the company’s path to an initial public offering (IPO).
Additionally, it strengthens the unicorn’s global expansion into emerging markets in Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe. Thus, together with PayU, Rapyd now handles transactions in more than 100 countries, serving more than 250,000 customers worldwide and expanding the global payments network network to more than 1,200 payment methods supported by 18 settlement centers.
In addition, the Israeli company serves 41 licensed or regulated countries, a portfolio of Tier 1 enterprise customers including Adidas, Google, Ikea, Meta, Netflix, Rappi and Uber, a wide variety of channel partners acquiring merchants from small and medium-sized businesses, including integrated software vendors (ISVs), independent sales organizations (ISOs) and payment facilitators (PayFacs), and has a combined global workforce of 1,700 people, working in 22 offices around the world and including over 50 nationalities.
“Rapyd’s mission has always been to grow boldly, and our global expansion continues uninterrupted with a year-on-year growth rate of nearly 100% by 2023,” Arik Shtilman, CEO and co-founder of Rapyd, said.
“Our strategy, focused on both organic growth and acquisitions, uniquely positions Rapyd as one of the world’s largest integrated global fintechs, delivering on our vision of a single, integrated fintech-as-a-Service platform,” he added.
Synergies with PayU include a richer technology stack, geographic expansion of licenses and greater market reach for the combined business portfolios.
“We are helping businesses around the world unlock global commerce, and we are excited to have the PayU team join us on this journey,” Shtilman said.
For his part, Laurent le Moal, PayU’s CEO, said: “PayU’s payments business has been an integral part of Prosus’ success and it was extremely important for us to work with a visionary company like Rapyd, capable of truly scaling our solutions and meeting the evolving needs of the world’s dynamic fintech landscape. Our team looks forward to joining Rapyd in building the best payments platform”.
Eric Rosenthal, Rapyd’s CSO, explained that the integration will imply a bilateral benefit for both companies because, on the one hand, PayU customers will benefit from Rapyd’s full product offering (which includes wallet infrastructure, disbursements and access to international payments), and on the other, Rapyd’s existing customers will gain access to PayU’s core functionalities in Latin America.
“This acquisition will help Latin America become one of the main regions for Rapyd - we estimate it will represent 25% of the global business, both on its path to an IPO and also, particularly, once it goes public,” he added.
Rapyd also noted that there is a growing need to support a wide variety of use cases, from accepting payments using locally preferred methods and cross-border payments to businesses and individuals, to card and credit issuance. And that companies can replace holding multiple bank accounts, processors and local payment providers with a single relationship with Rapyd.
This acquisition not only expands the global reach of the Israeli unicorn, strengthening its position in key vertical markets including e-commerce, logistics and transportation, but also reduces the complexity of creating and launching new applications, using one of the cross-border commerce and payment technologies already available to companies around the world.
The deal is subject to approval by regulatory authorities in several countries.
