Lucy: There are two startups in Boston that are making international payments easier and cheaper, albeit in fundamentally different ways. Circle and Flywire should both sound familiar to longtime BostInno readers but for our Fintech in Boston series, we decided to take a deeper look at their progress so far.
Dylan: While Circle focuses on peer-to-peer money transfer through its app, Flywire aims to make it easier and cheaper to transfer large dollar amounts across country borders to businesses, hospitals and academic institutions.
Together, the two companies have processed billions of dollars in transactions and raised nearly $180M in capital from investors, including Goldman Sachs and Fidelity Investments' corporate venture arm.
To date, Flywire has processed over $5B in cross-border payments, with $2B of that happening in the last fiscal year alone. For the 2017 fiscal year, the company expects to process roughly $3B. Across its three businesses, Flywire has 1,400 clients across 20 countries that accept payments using its system. While education is still Flywire's largest business, Mike Massaro, the company's CEO, told me the company has been profitable for two years.
Circle, on the other hand, processed $1B in transactions last year and has grown its global customer base by 300% in the last 12 months. In Europe, growth has been even more pronounced, with its number of users growing 10-fold within the past year. The company recently announced that U.S., U.K and European users can now transfer money with no fees of markup on foreign exchange, which will likely boost its growth even more.
While the company isn't focused on revenue right now, co-founder Sean Neville hinted to me that Circle might eventually get into lending (a recent company blog also teased "new avenues for saving and investing").
Lucy: If you want a deeper dive into Flywire and Circle and what's been driving their growth, make sure to read Dylan's story. Read more: How Two Boston Startups Are Shaking up the Payments Industry
Dylan: The good times keep rolling for Catalant, the consultant marketplace provider formerly known as HourlyNerd. The company just closed a $41M investment that includes debt financing and a Series D round led by Highland Capital and General Catalyst, bringing total funding to $73M. Forbes reported that the company is expected to make $50M in annual revenue this year based on sales from the last few months. Catalant plans to use the new funding on sales and marketing so that it can better educate companies on why an on-demand business expertise service could be useful.
Lucy: CloudHealth today announced it has closed its $46M Series D. A new investor, VC powerhouse Kleiner Perkins, led the round with participation from Meritech Capital Partners and existing investors: .406 Ventures, Sapphire Ventures and Scale Venture Partners.
Lucy: Speaking of payments, there's another payment processing company based in Boston that has been making a lot of moves – including partnerships, acquisitions and a full renovation of its HQ – while maintaining a low profile. Around a month ago, Cayan unveiled its new product, Genius Mini, a device that handles payments to a unique business made by tablets from a variety of sources, including chip cards, mobile wallets and magnetic stripe cards. “What we’re seeing is that a lot of merchants and businesses want to use an iPad solution, a tablet solution either at the point of sale or in the aisle or at the table,” Cayan CEO Henry Helgeson told me. Read more: This Boston Company's New Device Lets You Pay In the Aisle or at the Table
Dylan: Crop Enhancement, a Cambridge agtech company, just named Damian Hajduk as its VP of research and development. Hajduk was previously VP of food science for eatsa (also known as Keenwawa), which builds automated quick-service restaurants that feature high-protein grains like quinoa. The company also named Eric Flora, formerly of Pacific Ag Research and Dow Chemical, as field development manager, and Mark Russell, formerly of Syngenta, as market development executive.
Lucy: And we just got word that Avi Raichel is the new CIO of Zerto. Before joining the provider of cloud IT resilience solutions, Raichel spent the last 17 years at Amdocs.
Dylan: HUBweek, the festival founded by The Boston Globe, Harvard, Massachusetts General Hospital and MIT, today unveiled its initial lineup of 50 speakers and artists for the 2017 gathering, which will take place October 10-15. Organizers also revealed renderings of their plan to transform City Hall Plaza into a centralized festival site called “The HUB."
Lucy: Organizers announced the first 18 speakers today, including Juliette Kayyem and Malcolm Gladwell. The majority of HUBweek events will remain free and open to the public.
Lucy: As part of our Fintech in Boston series, Jean Donnelly, executive director of FinTech Sandbox, wrote a guest post about how providing fintech startups access to quality financial data is crucial to their success. "Startups innovating in financial services, especially those focused on capital markets verticals such as institutional investments and financial research, must integrate knowledge of extensive regulation, nuances of the market, and existing (often legacy) workflows into their business model. This is where the strength the Boston capital markets ecosystem, which is primarily asset management focused, proves pivotal to financial services innovation."
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