Checkout.com alumni have raised $4.55m in funding for fintech startup Revenew — which emerges from stealth today.
Los-Angeles based VC firm Fika Ventures led the round for Revenew, which aims to help platform businesses like Uber or Spotify to streamline their payments operations. Dash Fund and TTV Capital also participated in the fundraise.
“Checkout really gave me that exposure to building not just software but also teams and product,” says ex-senior vice president of engineering Ben Foster, who cofounded Revenew with Checkout.com’s former head of product Nicolas Thomson. “That ultimately led to the entrepreneurial spark needed to go ahead and found Revenew.”
The fundraise for Revenew, which has a team spread across the UK, Germany and Amsterdam, highlights the continued strength of Europe’s fintech unicorns as incubators for the continent’s next generation of founders. In the last 14 years, the continent’s 70 fintech unicorns have produced 423 startups founded by former employees, according to a report by VC firm Accel and data platform Dealroom (which covered up until September 2023).
Payments for platforms
Revenew is aimed at helping businesses facilitate payments, similar to the fintech unicorn where the two cofounders initially met. After leaving in 2021 and 2020 respectively Foster and Thomson reconnected while working at German B2B payment fintech Getpaid in 2022 and founded Revenew the following year.
Rather than acting as a payments processor akin to Checkout.com, Revenew provides an operating system, which companies can use to manage, streamline and optimise existing payment stacks.
Revenew aims to offer an extra layer of visibility that allows clients to track metrics such as the margin between the cost of providing payments and revenue generation, identify the most profitable customers and provide insight into how additional payments flows can increase revenue.
“If you boil it down to a single question, we’ve asked a lot of platforms, do you know what your margin is on every single payment? 99% of the time, the answer is no,” says Thomson.
The two cofounders say they currently have 10 to 15 companies signed up to its early access product, which includes hotel booking and management companies, gym membership platforms and car rental marketplaces.
Future plans
Revenew is currently planning to offer its flagship product for free, as it hopes to draw in clients with the insights it gives into payment operations. In the future, it plans to tack on tools enabling clients to action on any possible improvements identified by the platform in a paid-for Pro product.
“[Currently,] it’s showing them the problem and giving them the insights to make better decisions,” says Foster. “The actual tooling to action those decisions and ultimately drive better profitability and increase margin becomes the next big problem — that’s really where we see our next wave of tooling.”
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/revenew-checkout-raise-news/
