Checkout.com, one of Europe’s most valuable startups, saw losses at its UK entities balloon 73% to $306m in 2023, its financial filings show. The two UK companies lost $177m in 2022.
Across the same period, the fintech’s revenue from processing payments dropped after severing ties with “a large merchant”, thought to be crypto exchange Binance.
According to accounts covering January to December 2023, the London-based fintech brought in $212m in revenue generated in the UK from processing transactions across the year, a 13% dip on the $246m it made in 2022.
Checkout said the dip was “driven primarily by the termination of a large merchant,” and that the fintech itself had ended that contract. The merchant, which is not named in the accounts, could be crypto exchange Binance, which Checkout stopped working with in the summer of 2023.
Asked about the filings, a spokesperson for Checkout told Sifted that its revenues had grown 40% in 2024, across its global business. They added that Checkout does not publish its global group accounts.
Losses balloon
Checkout’s parent company is domiciled in Jersey. The recent filings cover two UK entities: Checkout Ltd, which records revenues from payments processing, and Checkout Technology Ltd, which holds the group’s IP and tech.
Checkout Ltd saw pre-tax losses improve from $138m in 2022 to $6m in 2023.
The significant losses, however, sit with the other entity: Checkout Technology Ltd, which UK employees started being paid from in April 2023. That entity saw losses balloon from $38m in 2022 to $300m in 2023.
That means that, combined, the two entities saw losses increase by 73% in 2023, to $306m.
A spokesperson for Checkout told Sifted that the filings represent only a portion of its global business. Jersey, where Checkout’s parent company is domiciled, requires limited financial disclosures from businesses.
Across the two entities, headcount was reduced slightly across 2023. Overall, the combined headcount across the two entities fell from an average of 1244 in 2022 to 1157 in 2023.
Valuation cuts
At the start of 2022, Checkout attracted a $40bn valuation when it raised a $1bn funding round from the likes of Tiger Global and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC.
By the end of 2022, however, an internal valuation priced the company at $11bn, a 75% cut put down to the changing fortune of tech stocks across that year. Last year, its value was then cut further to $9.4bn.
Since being founded in 2012, Checkout has raised $1.8bn from investors including Insight Partners, DST Global, Blossom Capital, Coatue and the Qatar Investment Authority.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/checkout-com-300m-losses-2023/
