Today, Miami fintech NovoPayment announced that it has raised a $19 million Series A financing round, led by local investors Fuel Venture Capital and IDC Ventures.
NovoPayment has developed an API-based banking-as-a-service platform that unlocks digital banking, payment, and card solutions for incumbent and up-and-coming firms alike. For instance, NovoPayment helps traditional banks and financial institutions scale in the digital economy by sidestepping the legacy systems that are holding them back. Merchants and marketplaces leverage NovoPayment’s infrastructure to provide bank-like services such as instant payments and the ability for clients to securely keep their cards on file.
Since launching in 2007, NovoPayment has entered 14 markets internationally. In 2021 alone, the company grew its client base by 40%, picking up major financial institutions including Visa and Mastercard, and the Inter-American Development Bank.
This infusion of capital will enable NovoPayment to grow their network of partners and integrations, bolster their headcount, and expand to new international markets.
When it comes to integrations, NovoPayment’s co-founder and CEO Anabel Perez told Refresh Miami that they hope to bring the platform to ride hailing companies and the travel industry, among others. “We’re building bridges between our platform and other service providers,” she explained, helping those companies create an even more seamless payment experience for their customers.
On the hiring side, Perez says that her team’s headcount will increase by 100. Currently, about half of NovoPayment’s 20-person team are based in Miami. While Perez still hopes to hire locally, she said that NovoPayment will be open to applicants from all around the US and Latin America. “Our company today represents what Miami is: it’s a multicultural organization with people from many countries including Cuba, Colombia, and Brazil.”
Perez herself originally hails from Venezuela and has more than two decades of experience working in finance. Establishing NovoPayment in Miami has enabled the company to take advantage of the highly active fintech space in Latin America and the Caribbean – a $6 billion market. With this Series A funding, Perez hopes to further entrench NovoPayment in the region, calling it a “blue ocean opportunity.”
“There’s a large number of inhabitants that live in cities with more than one million people,” she said of the company’s target market in Latin America and the Caribbean. They are also focusing on countries that receive an outsized amount of remittances from the US, as well as places where urban delivery and transportation markets are big. “That’s because we can embed financial services into those super apps,” Perez explained.
Maggie Vo, Fuel Venture Capital’s Chief Investment Officer and Managing General Partner, who is also joining NovoPayment as a board member, said the startup is poised for major growth.
“NovoPayment is in a very unique and advantageous position to thrive in the current fintech revolution since it is an extremely time-consuming and challenging endeavor to building a powerful end-to-end infrastructure and a proprietary API-based platform with high level of connectivity like Novopayment,” Vo said in a statement.
She continued: “As a female general partner, I am excited to support a female-founded company in securing one of the largest female rounds in the history of Miami.”
Perez has been actively involved in our local community, including as an Endeavor Miami entrepreneur and former board member. “Every time we go out to buy a coffee near our offices in Coconut Grove, you hear people about their ventures,” Perez said. “Our tech community is emerging, growing, and here to stay.”
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