Google's VC arm backs Currencycloud in $25M funding round

Google is betting on the success of the payments company Currencycloud.

The company announced Thursday that it has raised $25 million from GV, formerly Google Ventures, as well as existing investors Notion Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Rakuten FinTech Fund and Anthemis. With the Series D funding round, the five-year-old firm has raised a total of $61 million.

The company, which has headquarters in London and New York, plans to use the additional capital to fuel continued growth and global expansion. Currencycloud uses application programming interfaces to help challenger banks, prepaid cards, digital payments firms and others build cross-border payment products and applications. To date, $25 billion has passed through the company’s infrastructure to more than 200 countries. In a press release, CEO Mike Laven attributed the company’s success in part to the rise of the “building block economy.”

“Companies can combine services such as [Amazon Web Services], Google Maps, Stripe and Twilio to build innovative new businesses fast and without the overhead of expensive proprietary systems,” Laven said in the release. “Currencycloud provides a set of multi-currency payment and conversion tools that are helping hundreds of companies globalize fast.”

Tom Hulme, a general partner at GV, echoed Laven.

“We believe in empowering developers by making it easier for them to add scalable services to their products, ideally with simple APIs,” he said in the release.

GV’s other investments in the fintech business include API firm Plaid, the cross-border payments firm Ripple and the mobile payments firm LevelUp.

Currencycloud was one of American Banker’s 20 Fintech Companies to Watch in 2016.