The payment performance platform for enterprise digital commerce
HQ: London, United Kingdom | Founded: 2012 | Employees: ~1,900-2,000 | Stage: Late Stage — Decacorn (Private) | Website: https://www.checkout.com
Checkout.com is a global digital payments company headquartered in London, providing an end-to-end payments platform that lets enterprises accept, process, and disburse payments across 150+ currencies, 30 new local payment methods added in 2024, and 50+ direct acquiring markets. Founded in Singapore in 2009 as Opus Payments by Swiss entrepreneur Guillaume Pousaz and rebranded to Checkout.com in 2012 upon relocating to London, the company bootstrapped until its record $230M Series A in May 2019. It focuses exclusively on enterprise digital commerce — fintechs, marketplaces, travel, and retailers — with customers including Netflix, Sony, Klarna, Alibaba, Uber Eats, Revolut, Coinbase, eBay, Shein, Temu, and Wise. The platform offers a single API for gateway, acquiring, risk, vaulting (2.5B cards stored), and optimization, with a take rate of ~0.22%.
The company differentiates through performance obsession: its Intelligent Acceptance product uses ML to optimize routing, authentication, and data fields at 26,000 transactions per minute, unlocking $9-10B in incremental merchant revenue since launch, while Flow provides a customizable hosted checkout and Authentication and Fraud Detection Pro handle 3DS2 and risk. With direct Visa/Mastercard acquiring (first global provider with direct integration in Japan, 2024) and new products including Checkout Business Account (multi-currency holding, same-day settlement), Standalone Vault, Forward API, Issuing (Visa partnership), and Ubble-powered identity verification, Checkout.com is expanding beyond acceptance into treasury and financial services. The US became its fastest-growing region (+80% volume in 2024), with new direct acquiring planned for Canada and Brazil in 2025 and a San Francisco office opened in 2025.
Checkout.com is the archetype of the $40B peak-payments infrastructure story — a bootstrapped, profitable gateway that raised $1.8B to build a Stripe/Adyen challenger for pure enterprise. Its Jan 2022 $1B Series D at $40B made it Europe's most valuable fintech, but a 72.5% markdown to $11B by Dec 2022 (and $9.35B in 2023) forced an internal 409A reset before a recovery to $12B in Sept 2025. Unlike Stripe/Adyen's SMB breadth, Checkout bets exclusively on large merchants (63 clients >$1B TPV each), with 45% net revenue growth in 2024 and a return to full-year EBITDA profitability in 2025 at >10% margins. The moat is performance — Intelligent Acceptance optimizes 26k tx/min — but bank-owned acquirers still cap share via card-issuing authorization advantages.
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