European mPOS (mobile point-of-sale) startups SumUp and Payleven announced today their merging, in the future, the entity will operate under the name SumUp. Both companies launched in Europe in 2012 following the success of mPOS market leader Square in the US and are now combining forces to reach more
When asking the two founders why they decide to merge, Konstantin Wolff, co-founder of Payleven: “We’ve been in touch during the last four years, since the creation of our two services. And after years of being competitive, we realised that we were on the same page in term of vision, culture and product alignments. Much more alike than pretty much any other companies.”
“Today’s announcement is a game-changer for the mobile payments industry. It is another step towards delivering on our vision of creating the first ever global card acceptance brand. We could not think of a better partner for this step than Payleven with their impressive sales power. We have a ton of hard work ahead of us but combining our forces will allow us to unlock growth potential and further extend the products and services we offer to our merchants. We look forward to working together with Payleven on the future of mobile payments”, commented Daniel Klein, Founder and CEO of SumUp.
By joining forces, the combined company will be perfectly positioned to leverage both SumUp’s proprietary end-to-end hardware and payment platform, and Payleven’s leading merchant acquisition capabilities to accelerate growth in a very dynamic market. The mobile payment market is characterized by very attractive growth rates as more and more small businesses are looking for an easy and affordable way to accept card payments. “In the following months, our focus will be to bring the two platforms together by taking into consideration the best of both services and their complementary features, in order to offer our clients an ever more refined product,” said Klein, “using this opportunity we continue cracking the code to successfully scale this product and being the first global card acceptance system.”
The combined company currently processes more than €1 billion annually, in a total of 15 countries, and is now becoming a much bigger threat for Swedish competitor iZettle.
Rocket-Internet, French VC firm Seventure Partners and many others have invested a total of €45M in Payleven. While SumUp has raised about €40M from backers such as Groupon or American Express.
“SumUp and Payleven have decided to seize an exceptional opportunity: Two complimentary teams sharing the same vision joining forces. We can’t wait to put our full commercial power and experience behind distributing SumUp technology. With a turnkey mobile point-of-sale solution like ours, more and more small merchants are now able to accept card payments. We avoid them the paperwork and they don’t have to pay monthly fees. We are breaking all these barriers,” said Wolff.
The two founders are particularly enthusiastic and confident about the future of such payment solutions : “In the next 10 to 15 years, we expect to see 25 to 35 million mobile installed terminals in Europe, thanks to companies like us. And we want to be the first to capture that momentum.”