Tech infrastructure provider for financial institutions Amount entered the unicorn club after it netted $99m in a Series D round.
Growth equity firm founded by ex-Airbnb and Blackstone CFO Laurence Tosi WestCap led the round. Hanaco Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Invus Opportunities and Barclays Principal Investments also participated.
The newly raised capital will be used to speed up hiring in the company’s product, technology and sales groups while the company pursues merger and acquisition opportunities to add new products and features to the Amount platform.
The investment comes just over five months after Amount raised $86m in a Series C round led by Goldman Sachs Growth at a valuation of $686m. Since then, its valuation has doubled. The Series C round came just three months after the Chicago-based startup raised $58m in a Series B round in March last year.
Amount, whose latest funding brings its total funds raised to $243m since its inception in January of 2020, is a spinoff from the online lender Avant.
Amount’s mission is to help financial institutions “go digital in months — not years,” it said. It partners with banks and financial institutions to “rapidly digitise their financial infrastructure and compete in the retail lending and buy now, pay later sectors.”
The firm’s goal is to give institutions a way to offer “a secure and seamless digital customer and merchant experience” that leverages Amount’s verification and analytics capabilities. Furthermore, alongside omnichannel retail banking experiences, Amount delivers a point-of-sale financing product suite as well as platform features like fraud prevention, verification, decisioning engines and account management to enhance its partners’ existing products and services.
After escalating demand for technology in the FinTech industry caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, Amount saw a massive growth this year and last. Amount’s recent partnerships include one with Barclays’s US consumer bank who was one of the first big banks to offer instalment point-of-sale options, giving merchants the ability to white label POS payments using Amount’s technology. Other partners include HSBC, TD Bank, Regions Financial, Banco Popular and Avant.
Amount clients include financial institutions collectively managing nearly $2tn in US assets and servicing more than 50 million US customers, according to the company.
Commenting on the firm’s growth plans Amount CEO Adam Hughes said, “The additional capital clearly demonstrates the value our investors see in Amount’s ability to accelerate digital transformation in the banking and e-commerce industries through our robust retail banking suite and buy now, pay later platforms.”
Sharing the confidence in the startup, WestCap partner Kevin Marcus added, “We believe that Amount has the right framework in place to help banks modernize and update their infrastructure, which will democratize access to financial products, helping make them more understandable and available to consumers nationwide.”
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