Connect with us

Published

2 years ago

on

SumUp Chief Financial Officer Hermione McKee said the fresh capital gives the company “more firepower to act on opportunities,” including acquisitions and new country launches.

SumUp

British payments startup SumUp, known for its small card readers, on Monday announced it has raised 285 million euros ($306.6 million) in a bumper round of funding that values the company north of $8.6 billion.

Sixth Street Growth, the growth arm of global investment firm Sixth Street, led the investment in SumUp, while existing existing investor Bain Capital Tech Opportunities, fintech investment firm Fin Capital, and debt financing firm Liquidity Group, participated in SumUp’s latest round as well. The round predominantly consisted of equity, though a small portion of the funds was raised as debt.

SumUp Chief Financial Officer Hermione McKee said the fresh capital gives the company “more firepower to act on opportunities that we see arising over the course of the next two years.”

“If we think about our geographical expansion, in August we launched Australia as our 36th market globally,” McKee told CNBC in an interview last week ahead of the news.

“We have this foothold in Latin America and there’s more expansion that can be done there. Then we look at Asia, how do we think about that region, and then obviously opportunities across Africa. There’s so many opportunities globally. We’re constantly assessing this ‘buy versus build’ strategy.”

With this round, the company says it “continues to build further” on the valuation it attained in the summer of 2022, when SumUp was last valued at 8 billion euros ($8.6 billion) in a 2022 funding round that saw the firm raise a whopping 590 million euros of capital for growth and global expansion. A SumUp spokesperson confirmed the deal is an up round, meaning its valuation is higher than it was previously.

That’s no small achievement given the state of European technology valuations, which have taken a hammering over the past year as investors flee from tech due to higher interest rates and macroeconomic headwinds.

According to venture data firm PitchBook, median valuations declined in the third quarter across all stages compared to 2022, with late-stage valuations showing the most resilience and growth-stage the least.

Earlier this year, existing shareholders in SumUp sold stakes in the firm at a heavily discounted price to its last official valuation. One, online coupons site Groupon, disclosed in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that it was selling off shares in SumUp at a price that would value the company at just 3.9 billion euros ($4.2 billion).

M&A shopping spree ahead

SumUp, which competes primarily with Jack Dorsey’s payments business Block, formerly known as Square, as well as PayPal’s iZettle, FIS’ WorldPay, Stripe, and Adyen, has been expanding into new lines of business lately, not least lending. The company launched a service that enables merchant to apply for a cash advance or business loans up to a certain limit based on their card sales revenues.

SumUp secured a $100 million credit facility from Victory Park Capital this summer to bolster its cash advance offering. McKee said that the lending product has been going well so far, with the vast majority of its merchants paying back in a timely manner.

“We’re seeing quick returns on that capital, and merchants that are genuinely supporting their growth. And then they’re able to repay that back in a short time periods for the transaction volume that we see,” McKee said.

“We haven’t seen any real pullback in terms of repayment data over the course of the last six months,” she added. “Our models are constantly iterating to make sure that that those factors we’re observing don’t become stale.”

SumUp also launched new point-of-sale offerings, including self-service kiosks that let customers order in stores using a touchscreen interface.

SumUp recently launched Apple’s Tap to Pay feature in the U.K. and the Netherlands, which enables people to tap their card or phone on a vendor’s iPhone using a smartphone app. It’s also been upgrading its existing point-of-sale systems, with its POS Lite and POS Pros countertop systems that can be paired with SumUp’s card readers.

Going forward, SumUp plans to explore more merger and acquisition opportunities to help it drive its expansion abroad.

“M&A is always something that’s on the table,” McKee said. “We have expanded into new geographies in the past with M&A. That’s something we’re always assessing. We have experience in both building an ecosystem as well as buying. And both of these things are available to us, obviously, yes, this just gives us greater optionality and the ability to move quickly, should we see the right opportunity arise.”

SumUp has no immediate plans to go public, McKee added, as it has ample access to capital in the private markets.

“I think it’s proven by this round that we actually have access to private pools of capital, so we don’t need to IPO,” she said.

“We’re constantly improving processes, actually making sure that we are operating at a standard and quality that is appropriate for public markets. But at the same time, this is not something that, you know, is imminent, and around the corner that we’re actively planning for today.”

Related Topics:
Continue Reading

Technology

Jim Cramer: Patient Apple bulls are vindicated, and the stock is just getting started

Published

49 mins ago

on

October 20, 2025

By

Jim Cramer: Patient Apple bulls are vindicated, and the stock is just getting started

Continue Reading

Technology

What Jim Cramer expects from Boeing, and why he says Starbucks is a buy

Published

2 hours ago

on

October 20, 2025

By

What Jim Cramer expects from Boeing, and why he says Starbucks is a buy

Continue Reading

Technology

Anthropic launches Claude Life Sciences to give researchers an AI efficiency boost

Published

3 hours ago

on

October 20, 2025

By

Anthropic launches Claude Life Sciences to give researchers an AI efficiency boost

Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.

Gerry Miller | CNBC

Anthropic on Monday announced Claude for Life Sciences, a new offering for researchers to use the company’s artificial intelligence technology in the advancement of scientific discovery. 

Claude for Life Sciences is built around Anthropic’s existing AI models, but supports new connections with other scientific tools that are commonly used in labs during research and development.

It will be able to help researchers through all stages of the discovery process, from carrying out literature reviews to developing hypotheses, analyzing data, drafting regulatory submissions and more, Anthropic said.

The launch of Claude for Life Sciences marks Anthropic’s first formal entry into the sector, and comes just months after the company hired longtime industry executive Eric Kauderer-Abrams as its head of biology and life sciences. 

“Now is the threshold moment for us where we’ve decided this is a big investment area,” Kauderer-Abrams told CNBC in an interview. “We want a meaningful percentage of all of the life science work in the world to run on Claude, in the same way that that happens today with coding.”

Read more CNBC tech news

Anthropic, which is one of the companies at the center of the AI boom, develops a family of large language models called Claude. It was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI executives and researchers, and its valuation has swelled to $183 billion in just four years.

The company launched a new model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, late last month and said it is “significantly better” at life sciences tasks like understanding laboratory protocols.  

Kauderer-Abrams said researchers have already been engaging with Anthropic’s models to help with isolated parts of the scientific process, so the company decided to formally build out Claude for Life Sciences as a way to support them from start to finish. 

That meant Anthropic had to establish integrations with key players in the life sciences ecosystem, including Benchling, PubMed, 10x Genomics and Synapse.org, among others. Anthropic has also partnered with companies that can help life sciences organizations adopt AI, like Caylent, KPMG, Deloitte, and cloud providers AWS and Google Cloud, the company said.

“We’re willing and enthusiastic about doing that grind to make sure that all the pieces come together,” Kauderer-Abrams said.

In a prerecorded demo, Anthropic showed how a scientist working on preclinical studies could use Claude for Life Sciences to compare two study designs that test different dosing strategies. 

The scientist was able to query her lab’s data directly from Benchling, generate a summary and tables of key differences with links back to the original material. After reviewing the results, the scientist generated a study report that could be included in a regulatory submission. 

Anthropic said an analysis like this used to require “days” of validating and compiling information, but now, it can be done in minutes. 

Kauderer-Abrams said the company believes AI can bring about real efficiency gains for the life sciences sector, but it’s also under “no illusions” that it will magically overcome the physical limitations of conducting scientific research. Clinical trials that take three years are not suddenly going to take one month, he said.

Instead, Anthropic is focused on exploring the time-consuming, expensive parts of the discovery process “piece by piece” to determine where AI could be most useful.

“We’re here to make sure that this transformation happens and that it’s done responsibly,” Kauderer-Abrams said.

WATCH: Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.5, its latest AI model

Anthropic launches Claude Sonnet 4.5, its latest AI model

Continue Reading

Trending