15 Digital Payment Startups (2023)
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The total e-commerce market is worth approximately $5.7T (and growing rapidly).
With that growth comes a serious need for new payment options, payment technology, and back-end processing infrastructure.
By 2025, BNPL (Buy Now, Pay Later) companies alone will process an estimated $680B in transaction volume, which is one of the hottest trends in the fintech space today.
We’ve assembled some of the most innovative, exciting fintech payment startups that are transforming the way people pay for the things they buy online.
1. Flutterwave
5-year search growth: 1766%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2016
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $474.5M (Series D)
What they do: Built for the international community and started by Nigerian entrepreneur Olugbenga Agboola, Flutterwave provides a comprehensive payment suite that allows companies to accept a wide variety of payments from around the globe (including historically underserved continents like Africa.) Working with name brands like Uber and Booking.com,$200+ million raised to date has helped put Flutterwave on the map.
2. FamPay
5-year search growth: 99X+
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2019
Location: Bengaluru, India
Funding: $42.9M (Series A)
What they do: FamPay is a personal finance startup that offers a mobile payments and banking platform for teenagers and their families. Its platform provides a range of services, including payments, money transfers, and savings accounts, that aim to help teenagers learn about financial management and develop responsible spending habits. FamPay's solution also includes features for parents, such as spending controls and transaction monitoring, to ensure a safe and secure financial experience for their children.
3. Rapyd
5-year search growth: 620%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2016
Location: London, U.K.
Funding: $770M (Secondary Market)
What they do: London-based Rapyd has developed seamless ways to insert Fintech services inside any app, while also delivering cross-border payment solutions that settle transactions across differing currencies. Solving unique payment problems for customers across B2B like Grupo Modelo, Banks and Fintech startups like Paysafe, Marketplaces and Platforms like Uber, and E-commerce like Ikea, Rapyd’s comprehensive payment and collection suite has grown rapidly since 2016.
4. Gr4vy
5-year search growth: 0%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2020
Location: San Mateo, California
Funding: $27.2M (Series A)
What they do: Gr4vy uses the massive flexibility and scale provided by the cloud to power a full “payment orchestration platform” to manage a businesses’ entire payment stack. Instead of managing different vendors (like Klarna, PayPal, and Stripe) separately, Gr4vy puts it all in one place. Enterprise partnerships with Braintree, PayPal, Stripe, and other top-tier payment firms led to Gr4vy being named in Business Worldwide’s Top 20 Innovative Companies to Watch, 2021.
5. Above Lending
5-year search growth: 0%
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2011
Location: Houston, Texas
Funding: Undisclosed
What they do: With a TrustPilot rating of 4.5/5 in the traditionally low trust space of personal loans, Above Lending has streamlined the process of getting a personal loan with their simple application process.
6. BitPay
5-year search growth: -43%
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2011
Location: Atlanta, Georgia
Funding: $74.3M (Series B)
What they do: Bitpay is one of the biggest players in the growing Bitcoin payments space, allowing customers to custody their Bitcoin and spend it through the Bitpay app. Bitpay recently expanded into a “Business” segment, which allows businesses to accept Bitcoin payments. BitPay made headlines recently for accepting Shiba Inu coins through their platform as they continue to expand the number of cryptocurrencies they accept as payment.
7. MANTL
5-year search growth: 66%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2016
Location: New York, NY
Funding: $62.3M (Series B)
What they do: MANTL claims to be the “secret behind the fastest growing credit unions and banks”. MANTL’s secret sauce is giving financial institutions a digital toolkit that helps customers open new accounts in minutes. Customers include upstarts like Cambridge Savings Bank, Cross River, and Midwest Bank Centre. According to MANTL, results achieved include $5,000 in average funding for checking accounts, 4x increase in submitted applications, less than 3 minutes to open a new account, and more.
8. Toss
5-year search growth: -100%
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2011
Location: Seoul, Korea
Funding: $1.4B (Series G)
What they do: Toss has exploded in popularity since their founding 10 years ago, counting 21M subscribers and 1T won invested on their platform as major milestones thus far. Toss provides users based in Asia a potent alternative to Western-based personal financial apps like Robinhood, Betterment, or Stash. The team has attracted investment from PayPal, Kleiner Perkins, and Bessemer Venture Partners.
9. TrueAccord
5-year search growth: 208%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2013
Location: Lenexa, Kansas
Funding: $47.1M (Series Unknown)
What they do: Collecting debt is still one of the most time-consuming tasks for payment companies (especially those that operate with legacy technology.) TrueAccord’s platform encourages debtors to pay with their simple, seamless payment program. TrueAccord has been endorsed by top payment and debt associations, like RMAi and the Consumers Banking Association, as an industry leader in payment technology.
10. StormX
5-year search growth: 60%
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2014
Location: Seattle, Washington
Funding: $47.7M (Series Unknown)
What they do: As featured in Yahoo! Finance, Forbes, Nasdaq, and even the NBA, StormX is an app that lets shoppers earn cashback in the form of crypto. Users download the StormX app, shop at one of StormX’s 1000+ retail partners, and then earn crypto cashback at a rate from .5% to 87.5% depending on their membership level with StormX.
According to the startup, over $4.5M has been rewarded to date. And household brands like Groupon, Sonos, Levi’s, Lego, Nike and more have opted into StormX’s growing network.
11. NowPayments
5-year search growth: 400%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2019
Location: Amsterdam, Netherlands
Funding: Undisclosed
What they do: As more businesses look to accept cryptocurrency as payment, startups like NowPayments have thrived. Simple integrations with Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento and more mean that vendors can quickly get crypto payments up and running for their business.
12. Klarna
5-year search growth: 170%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2005
Location: Stockholm, Sweden
Funding: $4.5B (Series Unknown)
What they do: Klarna has taken off as one of the premier BNPL (Buy Now Pay Later) solutions, offering e-commerce customers a flexible way to pay over time. With a mammoth valuation of over $45B, Klarna has continued to forge ahead as one of the leaders in the e-commerce payments space. Counting premier retailers like H&M, Macy’s, Sephora, Adidas, and numerous others among their client base, Klarna now has over 90M shoppers worldwide, 250K retail partners, and processes 2M daily transactions.
13. Brex
5-year search growth: 300%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2017
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $1.5B (Series D)
What they do: Brex might be most famous for their iconic billboard advertising campaign that smothered San Francisco. In 12 months, Brex doubled their valuation and from March 2020 to March 2021, grew its revenue and TPV (total payment volume) by 100% according to CEO Henrique Dubugras.
14. Gemini
5-year search growth: 40%
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2014
Location: New York, New York
Funding: $423.9M (Series Unknown)
What they do: Gemini is a comprehensive exchange, payment platform, and crypto broker. Gemini has emerged into one of the world’s largest fintech payment startups after a massive funding round that valued them at $7.1B. Now offering products like a Gemini Credit Card with cashback and rewards (including earning crypto), Gemini has expanded from solely being an exchange to being a complete crypto-focused financial platform.
15. Sila Money
5-year search growth: 380%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2018
Location: Portland, Oregon
Funding: $20.7M (Series A)
What they do: Sila has built a powerful API that makes adding financial layers to an application simple, secure, and scalable. The kicker is that Sila’s API has regulatory compliance with US banking laws, typically the bane of developing new fintech applications. Sila has APIs for everything from Ethereum to JavaScript, .Net, Python, and C#. In 2021, Sila closed their Series A round to cap off an impressive year.
Conclusion
With the growth of e-commerce, fintech and crypto, (and especially the three technologies combined) the payment space is changing fast.
Keep checking in on the payment startups on our list as they continue to innovate, scale, and deliver new solutions.