Australia's mx51 secures $22.5m Series B
Mx51, an Australia-based payments technology platform that emerged as a partnership with Westpac, has raised AUD 32.5m (USD 22.4m) in Series B funding.
The round was led by an unnamed European-headquartered VC investor specialising in financial technology. Other participants are largely the same as those in the company’s AUD 25m Series A round last year, including Acorn Capital, Artesian, Commencer Capital, Rampersand, and Mastercard. The company joined Mastercard’s global financial technology accelerator programme in 2020.
Mx51 was originally part of Assembly Payments, an early mover in Australia’s payments space. Its plug-in technology for online marketplaces was launched in 2014, the same year Reinventure, a VC firm that is aligned with Westpac but operates independently of the bank, provided seed funding.
Four years and three funding rounds later, the business case was proven, and the bank made a direct investment. Westpac even moved its own payments team into Assembly, tasking the start-up with integrating its point-of-sale (POS) software with the bank’s merchant terminals.
In 2020, the business was split in two. Assembly spun out with the online payment assets and the company is now positioned as a digital platform that manages transactions across multiple payment types. It has received substantial backing from SCV Ventures, the VC unit of Standard Chartered.
Westpac retained its interest in the core banking payments technology assets, which were rebranded as mx51. It offers a white-label payment-as-a-service (PaaS) platform that integrates software with point-of-sale (POS) systems, enabling banks and non-bank acquirers to provide multi-channel payments and value-added solutions to merchants.
“Banks and acquirers partner with us because they are eager to overcome tech legacy challenges in order to offer modern payment solutions and a more holistic service to customers. This is something which banks’ main competitors in this space, Square, Stripe and Adyen, have been able to do quite effectively,” Victor Zheng, CEO and co-founder of mx51, told The Australian Financial Review.
He added that the company had helped customers reach more than 7,000 hospitality and retail outlets in the past year. The goal is to exceed 10,000 sites by the end of 2022. On closing the Series A in May 2021, mx51 said it expected cumulative transaction volume to surpass AUD 10bn within 12 months.
The company will continue to augment its platform functionality and add to its team, supporting a rollout that currently focuses on Australia but will ultimately expand overseas. Key product development areas include tailoring the online payments offering to target professional and trade services and helping merchants address payment fraud risks.
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