Plenty of tech firms are making some noise with SumUp, Gearset, Playter and trumpet picking up funding.
SME-focused fintech firm SumUp has raised €590 million (£508 million) – giving it an enterprise value of €8 billion (£6.8 billion).
DevOps company Gearset has announced a $55 million (£45 million) investment from Boston-based growth equity firm Silversmith Capital Partners. This is the first time Gearset has raised any funding since being founded six years ago.
Playter, a buy now pay later (BNPL) invoicing platform, has closed a $55 million (£45 million) funding round from the backers of Klarna, SoFi and Pipe. The funding is a mixture of equity and debt.
B2B sales startup trumpet has secured £1.6 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Lightbird Ventures, alongside Triple Point Ventures, Haatch and female-led Anamcara Capital.
SumUp Upbeat
London-based SumUp works with over four million small businesses worldwide.
The round was led by Bain Capital Tech Opportunities, with participation from funds managed by BlackRock, btov Partners, Centerbridge, Crestline, Fin Capital, Sentinel Dome Partners, among others. This latest round is a combination of debt and equity and brings SumUp’s total capital raised to €1.5 billion (£1.3 billion).
SumUp was founded in 2012. Its app provides merchants with a free business account and card, an online store, an invoicing solution, and in-person and remote payments integrated with SumUp’s proprietary card terminals and point-of-sale registers.
The fintech company is doing well. Its team of over 3,000 people works with merchants in 35 countries, with Peru (launched in June 2022) being the company’s most recent new market. In recent years, SumUp has also expanded into point-of-sale solutions, via the acquisitions of Goodtill, Tiller and Fivestars.
In February, SumUp selected Worldpay’s merchant solutions portfolio as it hunted for global expansion.
Gearset Goes Up a Gear
Gearset is based in Cambridge and offers DevOps solutions for Salesforce teams.
The funding will be used for product development and to expand its global team. Over the last year Gearset opened new offices in Chicago and Belfast, and doubled its employee headcount. It has 155 employees listed on LinkedIn.
The tech company is a sweetheart for the Salesforce world. Gearset created a comparison and deployment engine, then added tools for automation, data management and backups.
It runs 250,000 deployments a month across more than 1,700 companies. Customers include Sage, Legal & General, IBM and Accenture.
Playter Pushes On
London-headquartered Playter explains that Adit Venture Capital and Fasanara Capital led the funding round, with “notable” investments from Fin Capital, Act Venture Capital and 1818 Venture Capital.
The investment follows seed funding of $1.7 million (£1.3 million) in March. There are no specifics yet, but the fintech startup has international ambitions in the future.
Playter’s commercial model includes a subscription model within the B2B lending markets. This means “all funding is non-dilutive, unsecured, and carries no interest either”.
Founded in 2021, Playter’s clients include REalyse and Wiserfunding.
trumpet in Tune
trumpet was covered by eWeek UK in a scoop in February, where the musical puns made their debut. It offers personalised and trackable B2B sales pods. These act as an online closing tool and are designed like microsites for salespeople. The firm has no time for the concept of PDFs – which have their roots in 1993 – and wants to be an alternative.
The pods use APIs, no-code tools and templates. As a result, users can chat with customers in one place, while tracking customer engagement and using “top-performing” content via AI-powered analytics.
The London-based firm noted in February: “Think Squarespace + Canva + Slack, all combined to help you close more deals, faster.”
The latest investment will be used to grow its engineering, marketing and commercial teams. trumpet has a customer waitlist of more than 1,600 SME and enterprise companies from over ten countries, including the likes of Otta, Datadog, Deel, Google and GoCardless.
Rory Sadler, former sales lead at Hotjar, co-founded trumpet alongside Nick Telson and Andrew Webster, both of whom exited DesignMyNight in 2019.
