Financial technology startup Rapyd Financial Network Ltd. today announced that it has raised $300 million in funding to expand business operations and make more acquisitions. 

Target Global led the round, which comes only about eight months after Rapyd closed its previous $300 million raise. About a dozen other institutional investors participated as well including BlackRock, General Catalyst and Spark Capital. 

Companies with customers across multiple countries often require the ability to accept payments in local currencies. Additionally, such companies are in many cases expected by their customers to support local payment methods such as country-specific digital wallet apps. Rapyd provides a cloud-based service that enables businesses to accept funds in multiple currencies and via local payment methods without having to build the necessary transaction processing infrastructure from scratch. 

Rapyd supports more than 900 payment methods across over 100 countries, the startup says. Retailers can integrate the startup’s service with their stores’ point-of-sale systems to accept payments in local currencies. Business-to-business firms such as management consultancies, in turn, may use the startup’s service to bill enterprise clients. 

The e-commerce segment is another market that Rapyd targets with its service. For online retailers, the startup provides plugins that enable them to incorporate its payment processing service into their websites’ checkout pages. 

Rapyd earlier this year inked a $100 million deal to buy Valitor, an Iceland-based provider of payment processing services, to expand the reach of its platform. The startup plans to use the latest $300 million batch of funding provided by its investors to make “several” more acquisitions, it said this morning. Those deals will have two objectives: to grow the startup’s international presence and to bring new products into its solutions portfolio to facilitate expansion into new segments of the fintech industry. 

Rapyd has already moved into multiple fintech segments besides the payment processing market that represents its core focus. The startup offers application programming interfaces that banks can use to manage the process of opening new accounts and issuing payment cards to customers. For online retailers, Rapyd provides a low-code tool that simplifies the process of building e-commerce checkout pages, and it has also a service called Disburse that companies can use to send funds to business partners such as suppliers. 

Elaborating on Rapyd’s growth plans following the new funding round, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Arik Shtilman said that “we will continue to expand our presence across high-growth markets in Europe, Asia-Pacific, the US, and Latin America, where Rapyd’s platform can support businesses looking to grow internationally.”

Additionally, the executive specified that “we are doubling down on our channel partnerships strategy, strengthening our footprint across major high-growth markets, and exploring additional acquisitions that serve our strategic goals.”

Rapyd plans to not only acquire other companies but also make strategic investments. It recently set up its own venture capital fund, Rapyd Ventures, to back early-stage fintech startups. In particular, Rapyd is looking to back startups that help other companies build fintech products or themselves provide fintech products directly to end-users.

For enterprise software companies, operating a venture capital fund not only provides a way to capitalize on emerging market trends but can also be a useful driver of  product growth. The venture capital arm of Salesforce.com Inc., for example, regularly invests in startups that build products on top of the cloud giant’s software-as-a-service platforms. Backing such startups enables Salesforce to  strengthen the ecosystem of third-party tools available for its platforms and thereby make those platforms more competitive. 

Fintech startups have raised significant amounts of funding in recent months. Only last week, Solarisbank AG secured $224 million in fresh financing at a $1.65 billion valuation to expand the adoption of its cloud services suite, which helps banks and other companies build digital finance services such as digital wallets.

Image: Unsplash