GoCardless enters unicorn club with $312 million funding and $2.1 billion valuation

London-based fintech in direct bank payment solutions, GoCardless has secured a Series G funding round of $312 million. This makes the startup the latest European and UK tech unicorn at a valuation of $2.1 billion.

The round was led by Permira, which brings significant experience in backing best-in-class payments and financial software businesses, including Klarna, Clearwater Analytics and Carta. New investor BlackRock Private Equity Partners also joined the round.

The funding will enable the platform to accelerate its growing footprint in the open banking space through both product and geographical expansion as it targets becoming the world’s leading network for direct bank payments.

Since its last funding round in December 2020, the company’s valuation has more than doubled, while headcount has grown by 85%. GoCardless accelerated its investment in open banking product development and launched Instant Bank Pay, a new way to collect one-off bank-to-bank payments using open banking. Since then, it has already helped thousands of merchants in the UK and Europe process millions of dollars’ worth of one-time payments. 

It processes more than $25 billion in transactions per year and serves over 70,000 businesses around the world, including DocuSign, Klarna, TripAdvisor and Epson.

Hiroki Takeuchi, co-founder and CEO of GoCardless, said: “The rise of open banking presents a once-in-a-generation shift, one that will change the way payments happen all over the world. I look forward to working with our investors and our new board members to accelerate the future development.”

With the round, GoCardless will also add further technology and payments expertise to its Board of Directors with Michael Rouse, former Chief Commercial Officer at Klarna joining, and Koen Köppen, Chief Technology Officer at Klarna and Board Member of Mollie, joining as an independent director.