European VCs invest $8 million in APEXX Global

APEXX Global has completed a Series A fundraiser, bringing in $8 million from existing and new U.K. and Scandinavian investors to expand its payments platform.

London-based APEXX Global brings its total capital raised to-date to $12 million. Existing investors Forward Partners, Alliance Venture and MMC all increased their investments from a prior seed funding round. New to the APEXX investor pool is a grant from Innovate UK, the U.K. government’s public agency that supports innovation and research. The funds will be used to enhance APEXX’s next generation payment routing capability on its payment platform, as well as to recruit additional staff for its headquarters office in London and two satellite facilities in India (Pune and Ahmedabad).

"I’m delighted to announce that we have successfully closed our Series A funding round, with the continued participation from Forward Partners, MMC and Alliance Ventures alongside a new investor,” said Peter Keenan, co-founder and CEO at APEXX Global, in a press release. “This is a challenging time for many businesses, and it is fantastic to have continued validation of our mission to revolutionize the global payments industry for merchants. We’ve seen significant growth over recent years and have had great success in increasing efficiency and reducing costs.”

APEXX launched in 2017 with the mission of being a platform that would enable merchants to view and compare costs between payment brands and acquirers, while receiving advice on which choice would be the best payments processing option for the merchant. At the time, APEXX claimed that it could lower processing costs for cards and other payment methods by about 20%.

While the actual savings by merchant will vary, and documentation from APEXX is unavailable to confirm its claims, the company’s continued ability to raise money makes it clear that its platform is resonating well in the market. APEXX has also been able to attract top tier payment executives to its team, such as Toreson Lloyd from WorldPay, and build partnerships with acquirers, card networks and payments processors such as iZettle (owned by PayPal), Credorax, Paysafe, Mastercard, Alipay and SIX Payment Services (owned by Worldline).

Forward Partners is an investor that is also backing British P2P Lender Zopa, which made news in 2018 when it partnered with tennis star Andy Murray’s-backed Commuter Club to provide installment loans for annual season ticket holders.

Oslo, Norway-based Alliance Venture, which also participated in the fundraiser, is heavily focused on data mining and analytics. One of its notable investments included Encap Security, which provides multi-factor authentication and e-signature solutions to the financial services industry, helping banks and payment firms to solve regulatory compliance issues for PSD2 and GDPR. Encap was acquired by Austin, Texas-based credit monitoring and identity theft repair outfit AllClear ID in 2016.