Source: WePay
Today, we're excited to share two major WePay milestones:
1. A $15 million Series C financing lead by Phil Purcell of Continental Investors, co-founder of the Discover Card and former CEO of Morgan Stanley.
2. Our API business has grown 600% over last year. This growth is fueled by platforms connecting buyers and sellers in new verticals, as well as helping merchants and non-profits connect/communicate with their customers/donors. As we double down on our API business we will be discontinuing our direct-to-consumer business to allow us greater focus on our payments API for such platform businesses.
When we first started WePay, we wanted to make it easy for individuals to collect money. And over the last four years, we've realized that the largest opportunity to empower individuals to accept payments was through empowering platforms that those individuals use. And so, we've transitioned from a "group payments" company to a payment company for platform businesses.
I know that for our hundreds of thousands of direct WePay users, this will be a very significant change, and we will work tirelessly over the next few months to make the transition as smooth as possible. We'll do this by having invoicing, event and donation platform partners ready to switch to with as little effort as possible. I'm confident that this will lead to a better experience for our merchants in the long-term, since our platform partners can focus on building great software and we can focus on easy and frictionless payments.
Over the past year, we've focused on a few types of platforms:
Marketplaces
Crowdfunding
Small business software
We're now proud to have over 300 great platforms built on our system, ranging from marketplaces like Care.com and CustomMade to crowdfunding platforms like GoFundMe to small business software like Soldsie, Less Accounting, Bookfresh and Formstack.
Our partners know that building a platform is hard, and the challenges abound: Risk and fraud, regulatory compliance, trust and safety, payments complicompliance - not to mention the hardest part, which is growth.
We believe that payment companies should do more than just move money, they should help solve payment related problems like fraud and compliance. So we have built our Veda risk engine to do exactly that, enabling our platform partners to focus on frictionless user experience without worrying about regulation or risk.
We're thrilled to have an investor like Continental join the team because of their depth of experience both in payments and in later stage/public markets. Paul and Phil Purcell are great people - the kind of people that you want on your team. We're also honored to have such strong support from our great existing investors: Highland Capital Partners, August Capital, Ignition Partners, Max Levchin, Maynard Webb and Raymond Tonsing.
WePay's future lies in our API. Through our partners, we have the opportunity to reach more people, to grow even faster, and to build a best-in-class infrastructure.