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.”
A person walks by a sign for Micron Technology headquarters in San Jose, California, on June 25, 2025.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
Micron reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue on Tuesday as well as a robust forecast for the current quarter.
The stock rose in extended trading.
Here’s how the company did in comparison with the LSEG consensus:
Earnings per share: $3.03, adjusted, vs. $2.86 expected
Revenue: $11.32 billion vs. $11.22 billion expected
Micron said revenue in the current period, its fiscal first quarter, will be about $12.5 billion, versus the $11.94 billion average analyst estimate per LSEG.
The company said it had $3.2 billion, or $2.83 per share in net income, versus $887 million, or 79 cents in the year-ago period.
Micron shares have nearly doubled so far in 2025. The company makes memory and storage, which are important components for computers. Micron has been one of the winners of the artificial intelligence boom. That’s because high-end AI chips like those made by Nvidia require increasing amounts of high-tech memory called high-bandwidth memory, which Micron makes.
“As the only U.S.-based memory manufacturer, Micron is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the AI opportunity ahead,” Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra said in a statement.
Overall company revenue rose 46% on a year-over-year basis during the quarter.
Micron’s largest unit, which sells memory for cloud providers, reported $4.54 billion in sales during the quarter, more than tripling on a year-over-year basis.
However, the company’s core data center business unit saw sales decline 22% on an annual basis to $1.57 billion in revenue.
Google-owned YouTube on Tuesday said it will soon allow previously banned accounts to apply for reinstatement, rolling back a policy that had treated violations as permanent.
The change applies to channels removed for posting Covid-19 or election-related misinformation, according to a letter fromAlphabet lawyer Daniel Donovan to House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. Previously, those types of offenses carried lifetime bans.
“Today, YouTube’s Community Guidelines allow for a wider range of content regarding Covid and elections integrity,” Donovan wrote.
YouTube wrote on X that it will be a limited pilot project open to a subset of creators as well as channels that were terminated under policies the company has since retired. YouTube also said its new reinstatement program will launch soon.
Among channels previously banned under those rules were some associated with Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. It’s not yet clear whether those channels will be reinstated.
This move follows mounting Republican pressure on tech companies to reverse Biden-era speech policies on vaccine and political misinformation. In March, Rep. Jordan subpoenaed Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, alleging YouTube was a “direct participant in the federal government’s censorship regime.”
In 2021, YouTube said it would remove content that spread misinformation about all approved vaccines.
Donovan wrote that during the pandemic, senior Biden administration officials pressed the company to remove certain Covid-related videos that did not technically violate YouTube’s policies.
In the letter, Donovan said this pressure was “unacceptable and wrong.”
YouTube ended its stand-alone Covid misinformation rules in December 2024, according to Donovan’s letter.
YouTube “will not empower third-party fact-checkers” to moderate content and will continue to enable “free expression” on the platform, Donovan wrote. While Donovan writes that YouTube has not used fact-checkers, the platform has produced programs that are meant to label context on videos.
Similarly, Meta said in January that it had eliminated its fact-checking program on Facebook and Instagram.
YouTube has a feature that will display information panels with links to independent fact checks under videos. The feature says it provides more context on videos across YouTube with information from third-party sources.
In 2017, Google launched a fact-checking tool that would display labels on search and news results.
People walk past an Amazon Fresh store in Washington, DC, on August 26, 2021.
Nicholas Kamm | AFP | Getty Images
Amazon plans to close all of its Fresh supermarkets in the U.K., in the latest recalibration of its grocery strategy.
The company said in a Tuesday blog that it’s preparing to close all 19 of its Fresh U.K. stores, “following a thorough evaluation of business operations and the very substantial growth opportunities in online delivery.” Five of the Fresh locations are expected to be converted into Whole Foods stores, Amazon said.
Amazon opened its first Fresh location outside the U.S. in London in 2021, about a year after it debuted the store concept in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles. Fresh stores offer cheaper prices and more mass-market items compared to Whole Foods, the upscale supermarket chain Amazon acquired for $13.7 billion in 2017. Many of the stores also feature Amazon’s cashierless “Just Walk Out” technology.
The Fresh store pullback in the U.K. comes as Amazon has continued to adjust its grocery ambitions. The company has slowed expansion of its Fresh grocery chain and Go cashierless stores in the U.S. It still maintains 500 Whole Foods locations and has opened mini “daily shop” Whole Foods stores in New York City.
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At the same time, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and other company executives have touted the success of sales of “everyday essentials” within its online grocery business, which refers to items like canned goods, paper towels, dish soap and snacks.
Jassy told investors at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in May that he remains “bullish” on grocery, calling it a “significant business” for Amazon.
The company on Tuesday also said that it plans to offer same-day delivery of groceries, including perishable items, in the U.K. beginning next year.