London-based buy now pay later (BNPL) firm Zilch has raised $110 million in a Series C funding led by Ventura Capital and Gauss Venture and the firm plans to use this money to expand its business to the US, according to media reports. This latest round of funding comes eight months after a Series B at a $500 million valuation.
The company recently also acquired debt funding platform Neptune Financial to fast-track its launch in the US. It has already set up an office in Miami with about 10 employees working on its US expansion. And with the BNPL market making strides in the industry, Zilch now has over a million customers and is adding around 20,000 new customers every month.
In recent years, BNPL has seen a huge surge in demand along with the acceleration of e-commerce, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. According to reports, around 2.1 percent of all global e-commerce transactions, which amounts to around $97 billion in 2020 was via BNPL.
The company, in partnership with Monavate has built a platform that lets customers tap to pay wherever they want. Zilch only opened in Beta in 2019 where it wanted to set itself apart in the BNPL market by connecting itself directly with the customers and using soft background credit checks performed by Credit Kudos via Open Banking to determine affordability.
Founded in 2018, Zilch’s BNPL app allows customers to shop wherever Mastercard is accepted and spread payments out over six weeks. It is also one of the first BNPL providers in the UK which is completely regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). The company also says that it uses