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AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Fintech startup Nium has raised $50 million in new funding from investors and plans an initial public offering within the next 18 months, the company told CNBC on Wednesday.
The round was led by an undisclosed Southeast Asian sovereign wealth fund and supported by venture capital firms BOND, NewView Capital and Tribe Capital.
Nium is valued at $1.4 billion. That’s a 30% discount to the company’s previous valuation of $2 billion, which was in 2022 when it last raised outside venture capital.
Prajit Nanu, CEO and founder of Nium, said the company will use the new funds to strengthen its mergers and acquisitions efforts and target payment companies in other growth stages.
Nanu said his company’s next round of funding is a result of the generally depressed public market valuations of fintech companies.
Share prices of fintech companies have fallen sharply in recent years due to macroeconomic pressures such as high inflation and rising interest rates.
“To be honest, when we were raising money in early 2022, the public markets were killing it,” Nanu said. “Public markets have not been kind to fintech.”
IPO 18 months later
Nanu said that despite the lower valuation, he remains bullish on Nium’s growth story and is confident the company will go public within the next 18 months, targeting a listing in the third or fourth quarter of 2025.
He added that valuation is not a concern for him and that it doesn’t matter how much the company is priced because the market is inherently volatile.
“Whether you go public at $1 billion or $5 billion, it doesn’t matter. Because the valuation will only be reflected when you get acquired or do an IPO,” he said.
He cited the example of Stripe, which raised a $95 billion valuation during the boom in 2021, then slashed its valuation to $50 billion before boosting its valuation to $65 billion through secondary stock transactions. .
Not interested in cryptocurrencies
Nanu said he is not interested in acquiring companies in the cryptocurrency space because he has no interest yet Seeing demand from merchants for cryptocurrencies as a payment method.
“It’s in the early stages of infrastructure,” Nanu said. “Nium is ultimately a layer on top of many of the banks in the world.”
“Banks have gone from crypto being hot, to not being crypto, to crypto,” he added. “It’s not a one-size-fits-all shoe.”
While cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have surged in price, the price of Bitcoin has also risen amid renewed investor interest following the approval of a spot Bitcoin exchange-traded fund in the United States.
In the past 12 months, the price of Bitcoin has increased by approximately 150%.
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