PPRO gains investment from JPMorgan Chase in new $90 million round

Fresh off the heels of a $180 million fundraiser in January, Citi Ventures-backed PPRO raised an additional $90 million in new investments in its latest equity round.

The latest round included two new investors, JPMorgan Chase and Eldridge Industries. The latter is a venture capital firm that has made significant investments in fintech startups such as PayActiv, Truebill, Stash, Dataminr and crypto wallet Blockchain.com.

“Alternative payments adoption is increasing rapidly across the globe,” said Sanjay Saraf, managing director and global head of the integrated payments group at JPMorgan Chase, in a release. “We are proud to become a strategic investor in PPRO as they work on their next phase of growth.”

In the January round, PPRO achieved unicorn status by being valued at over $1 billion.

London-based PPRO has carved out a niche in the payments industry at a time when e-commerce is being driven to new heights by the COVID-19 pandemic by delivering retailers access to foreign customers who want to use their preferred local payment method, such as Sofort (Germany) and iDEAL (Netherlands), in lieu of credit cards.

Based on data from PPRO’s Payments Almanac, e-wallets, bank transfers and cash represent major alternative payment methods to payment cards that many consumers prefer to use when shopping online.

In the e-commerce boom, PPRO has seen its transaction volume double in 2020 and increased its global team size by over 60%. PPRO has been particularly aggressive in its global expansion efforts over the past 12 months. In March, PPRO expanded its position in Italy, which it claimed has a $30 billion business-to-consumer e-commerce market, and in September it expanded its global offerings to include Indonesian payment methods Doku and OVO.

In June, PPRO acquired Latin American payments specialist allpago to bridge a gap in that market, and in March 2019 added Mexican convenience store chain OXXO as a client, the largest in Latin America with more than 18,000 locations, to enable consumers to be able to pay for e-commerce purchases using cash at OXXO’s stores.

“I’m delighted to welcome JPMorgan Chase and Eldridge to our world-class group of investors as we continue to strengthen and expand our local and alternative payment capabilities,” Simon Black, PPRO's chief executive, said in a news release.

PPRO has raised over $280 million in six funding rounds since 2014 based on data from Crunchbase, a website that tracks investments in private companies. Additional investors include PayPal Ventures, Sprints Capital, Eurazeo Growth and Wellington Management.