Italian Satispay raises €320m at a valuation of over €1bn with backing from Block, Tencent and more for its independent payment network

Increasing signs of a slowing economy in Europe and rising costs are driving merchants and consumers to look for less expensive ways to carry out their day-to-day business. Now an Italian startup called Satispay — which operates an independent payment network that bypasses big banks and credit companies and promises lower transaction fees and other benefits like better budget control to its users — is collecting massive funding on the back of strong demand for his services.

The Milan-based startup, which currently has 3,000,000 consumers and 200,000 merchants (both SMEs and large retailers) among its users, has raised €320 million ($305 million to date, on the basis of an extremely strong dollar). CEO and co-founder Alberto Dalmasso confirmed to us that this Series D catapults the company's valuation to over €1 billion (currently around $955 million).

The all-equity cycle has some very interesting investors, including some eye-catching strategies. It is run by Addition, the company founded by Lee Fixel; also with the participation of Greyhound Capital, Coatue, Lightrock, Block Inc. (the American fintech formerly known as Square), the Chinese Tencent (which owns WePay and much more) and Mediolanum Gestione Fondi SGR. Tencent and Block are part of a group that quietly started supporting Satispay in 2021, while Greyhound has been investing in it since 2018.

This latest Series D is a major step forward and a mark of Satispay's ambitions: before that, he had only raised €130 in three rounds. This latest cycle ranks among the highest ever for an Italian tech startup.

The funding will be used for both expanding Satispay's product line, as well as geographic expansion. Satispay got its start in Italy and the country now accounts for the bulk of the company's business, but the startup's plans also include expanding into France and Germany, where it has begun to expand. its operations in recent years.

Satispay is part of a larger wave of companies that have emerged in recent years with ambitions to build payment rails that bypass those of larger, older, slower, and more incumbents. more expensive ; a trend that exploded with the rise of mobile. cellphones, a much broader ability (and demand) for individuals and businesses to use digital networks for financial transactions, and frankly an investor appetite to support disruptive technologies that may prove to be next" killer app".

The ever-expanding group also includes companies like Dwolla in the US (which Dalmasso says is probably the most similar to Satispay in terms of how it works); peer-to-peer payment efforts like PayPal's Venmo and Square's Cash App; buy-it-now and pay-later services; and the plethora of blockchain-based efforts to create new currencies and ways to buy and sell; and much more.

Satispay was born when Dalmasso and his co-founder Dario Brignone (who is the CTO) came together around a common observation: that the world was moving towards less cash. But at least in Italy in 2012 there was a big void in the market: many traders, especially the smaller ones who make up the majority of retailers and others in Italy, were not inclined to use slot machines. cards due to the high number of transactions. values.

Dalmasso's metric was a single cup of espresso: it was the most common thing purchased in a café and each had to be paid for in cash.

So they set out to see if they could create their own payment network that would essentially reduce the friction of paying for that espresso without customers needing to rush to get coins, and without giving customers a hard time. traders by causing them to lose money to sell by any means other than cash.

The bet was that once you created it, it would be used to pay for other things, as well as more expensive items.

Although the world has come a long way since then and contactless payments in many places have removed the minimum spend limit (and prices have unfortunately increased), Satispay has incorporated other features that make it unique and have helped it remain popular with users. One of them is that users basically deposit money into a Satispay account from their existing bank accounts to spend over a period of time, much like a prepaid account, which helps them control what they spend every month.

“The goal was not to create a new bank, since we all have bank accounts,” he said. It also means that Satispay still plays well with banks and the like.

It is planned to improve the connections between bank accounts and Satispay so that users have more options for more continuous funding if they do not wish to use the prepayment option. And while there's no longer any sort of in-app credit, there are clear synergies between Satispay and buy now. pay for services later, so it's...