Big banks, Wunala Capital pile into $30m payments fintech raise

“[Early last year] everyone thought there was a correction coming, but we didn’t know exactly when it was. When it hit, we had to reassess what our needs were,” he told The Australian Financial Review.

“We had a need for capital that was determined by a couple of things – we could go to the moon, or measure out what we wanted to do [in terms of] hiring people, exploiting our work with Deutsche Bank in APAC and delaying our big expansion plans into North America by 12 to 18 months.

“There was a little bit of panic that the world was turning upside down and our advisers told us to scale back the round.”

As reported by Street Talk in September, the company settled on $15 million as the amount it needed to keep progressing the business – hiring some critical staff and developing its suite of products. At the time, the business was said to be raising at a $115 million valuation, but Mr Nagy said the round ended up pricing the company at a significantly higher value.

“We were offered a larger amount than what we were going after. We thought we still didn’t know what the headwinds looked like, so we’d take on some extra money, but we cut it off at $30 million,” he said.

“The money has already started to help us… it’s letting us get some really quality talent … still with a heavy tech weighting to engineering. The other things is we’re using the funding to double down on data analytics development.”

The company will likely tap investors for additional funding in the future, but Mr Nagy said if the funding market tightens further, it can pare back investment and become cashflow positive.

In Australia, DataMesh has deals with NAB and ANZ, while internationally Deutsche Bank is deploying its online payment acceptance technology in India, South Korea, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam.

“The payment orchestration layer enables us to offer a comprehensive payment solution for our clients, who demand a global one-stop shop for their payment acceptance in various countries and regions,” Deutsche Bank’s APAC head of merchant solutions, Oliver von Quadt, said.

NAB is piloting a range of DataMesh’s products with a group of merchants. NAB Ventures managing director Amanda Angelini said the bank was excited to offer its solutions to its business customers.

“We’re increasing our equity stake as we are expanding our partnership with DataMesh through distributing their solutions to our business customers, which will create significant revenue, scale and value for DataMesh,” she said.

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