UK Startup Checkout.com to Open Headquarters in Riyadh After $450 Million Series-C Funding Round

Checkout.com, a payments solution startup based in the UK, has announced its intention to open an office in Riyadh, after raising $450 million in a Series-C funding round. The move will see the startup expand its presence in the MENA region, with the company now valued at a whopping $15 billion.

Launched in 2012 by Guillaume Pousaz, Checkout.com first arrived in MENA in 2013, but this new move hopes to double the startup’s operations in the region as a one-stop-shop for e-commerce payment services.

In addition to opening an office in Riyadh, Pousaz has also signalled his intent to expand an existing team in Dubai, building on busy 2020. Citing their Connected Payments in MENAP report, Checkout.com says that more than 1,000 new merchants in MENA were onboarded during the pandemic and it experienced year-on-year growth of 86% in its volume of transactions. In fact, during the pandemic, the platform processed some 400 million e-commerce transactions across MENA. For Checkout.com, however, the pandemic only played a small part in this growth.

“We have been a very fast-growing company irrespective of Covid-19 happening or not,” Checkout.com's executive vice-president of global e-commerce, Sebastian Reis, said. “At no stage have we significantly deviated from our plans that were laid out all the way back to our Series A round of funding. The pandemic did provide us with a strong tailwind, but if anything, it simply reinforced and made more obvious trends that we were seeing anyway. It accelerated the speed at which people moved over to e-commerce and used digital payments.”

Pandemic or not, the increase in demand for e-commerce services both in MENA and the rest of the world, means that Checkout.com’s expansion plans have come at an opportune time.

Learn more about Checkout.com here.