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AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Financial technology startup Nium told CNBC Wednesday it raised $50 million in new funds from investors, and is targeting an initial public offering in the next 18 months.
The fundraising round was led by an undisclosed Southeast Asian sovereign wealth fund and backed by venture capital firms BOND, NewView Capital, and Tribe Capital.
It places Nium’s valuation at $1.4 billion. That marks a 30% discount to its previous valuation of $2 billion, which the firm notched in 2022 when it last raised external venture capital.
Prajit Nanu, Nium’s CEO and founder, said the firm would use the fresh capital to double down on mergers and acquisitions, targeting other growth-stage payment firms.
Nanu said his company’s down round was the result of a broader depression in public market valuations of fintech companies.
Fintechs have seen their stock prices slashed in recent years as a result of macroeconomic pressures, including high inflation and rising interest rates.
“Being realistic, when we raised in early 2022, public markets were killing it,” Nanu said. “The public markets have not been kind to fintech.”
IPO in 18 months
Nanu said that, despite the lower valuation, he is still bullish on the growth story for Nium and is confident the company will go public in the next 18 months, targeting a flotation in the third or fourth quarter of 2025.
He added that valuation isn’t a concern for him and that it won’t matter what value the company prices its shares as markets are volatile by nature.
“Whether you go public at $1 billion, $5 billion, it doesn’t matter. Because the valuation is only when you get bought, or when you go through an IPO,” he said.
He noted the example of Stripe, which raised a $95 billion valuation in the heady days of 2021 before slashing its value to $50 billion and then boosting its valuation to $65 billion in secondary share transactions.
Not interested in crypto
Nanu said he’s not interested in acquiring companies in the cryptocurrency space as he doesn’t yet see merchant demand for crypto as a payment method.
“It’s on the very early side of infrastructure,” Nanu said. “Nium in the end is a layer on top of a lot of banks in the world.”
“Banks have gone from, crypto is hot, to not crypto, to crypto,” he added. “It’s not one shoe fits all.”
That’s despite a huge rise in prices of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, which have rallied off the back of renewed investor interest following the approval of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds in the U.S.
Bitcoin has seen its price climb roughly 150% in the last 12 months.