Flywire secures unicorn status with $120 million Series E funding round
Payments processing firm Flywire has received $120 million in funding in a Series E funding round led by Goldman Sachs and announced the acquisition of healthcare technology firm Simplee.
Mike Massaro, Flywire CEO
The funding, which pushes Flywire past the billion-dollar mark and into unicorn status, will be used by the firm to bolster its “multi-vertical strategy”. The firm has now raised a total of $260 million to date.
Its acquisition of Simplee, meanwhile, will see Flywire combine its payments platform with the healthcare firm to “empower” the settlement capabilities of patients and providers.
“The Simplee acquisition improves patient engagement and healthcare affordability and extends these capabilities to a broader customer base,” says Mike Massaro, CEO of Flywire.
Flywire was founded in 2009 to simplify the process of paying for education while living abroad, and has since dipped into other verticals like hospitality, healthcare, and retail.
Massaro spoke to FinTech Futures earlier this month about how the firm purposely seeks out industry verticals that have payments problems, because it knows that their back-end systems would be different to the norm.
“Travel booking systems, for instance. If you can’t integrate to the bookings platforms, you’re not that valuable to them,” he said at the time.
“In education, if you’re not connected to the student information systems and don’t have experience integrating software with those student information systems, you can’t deliver a full solution.”
Related: Flywire CEO talks payments platforms, consolidation and fragmentation
Goldman Sachs’ Ashwin Gupta, managing director for merchant banking, says that the bank is “thrilled” to lead the Series E.
“[Flywire brings] together a unique blend of a payments network, platform and vertical-specific solutions to completely digitize the payments experience for their clients across industries.”
Bank of America deployed Flywire in October 2019, going live on a cross-border solution for its healthcare and higher education clients.
The payments firm appointed a new president and COO the following month in former Apple Pay alum Rob Orgel.
