Nium, a financial technology startup in the Netherlands, said on Wednesday that it has secured $50 million from new investors and plans to go public in the next 18 months.
TakeAway Points:
- Nium, a financial technology startup, said on Wednesday that a Southeast Asian sovereign wealth fund that wishes to remain anonymous led a $50 million fundraising round.
- With the support of venture capital firms BOND, NewView Capital, and Tribe Capital, the company is valued at $1.4 billion in this round, which represents a 30% reduction from its previous valuation.
- Even with the decreased valuation, Nium is optimistic that it can go public over the next 18 months and plans to make its stock market debut in the third or fourth quarter of 2025.
30% reduction in Nium’s valuation
An unnamed sovereign wealth fund from Southeast Asia spearheaded the fundraising round, with support from venture capital firms BOND, NewView Capital, and Tribe Capital.
Nium is valued at $1.4 billion, according to this. This represents a 30% reduction from the company’s previous valuation of $2 billion, which it achieved when it last sought outside venture funding in 2022.
Prajit Nanu, the CEO and founder of Nium, stated that the company would pursue other growth-stage payment companies in its pursuit of mergers and acquisitions with the additional funds.
According to Nanu, a larger decline in the public market valuations of fintech companies was the cause of his company’s downturn.
Macroeconomic headwinds such as rising interest rates and soaring inflation have caused fintechs’ stock prices to plummet in recent years.
“Being realistic, when we raised in early 2022, public markets were killing it,” Nanu said. “The public markets have not been kind to fintech.”
18-month IPO
Despite the reduced valuation, Nanu expressed his continued optimism about Nium’s development story and his belief that the firm will go public within the next 18 months, with a flotation intended for the third or fourth quarter of 2025.
He went on to say that since markets are inherently unstable, he is not concerned with valuation and that it will not matter what price the company sets for its shares.
“Whether you go public at $1 billion, $5 billion, it doesn’t matter. Because the valuation is only when you get bought, or when you go through an IPO,” he said.
He gave Stripe as an example, which peaked at $95 billion during the wild days of 2021 before dropping to $50 billion and then increasing its valuation through secondary share sales to $65 billion.
Not a fan of cryptocurrency
Because he does not yet see merchant demand for cryptocurrencies as a payment mechanism, Nanu stated that he is not interested in buying businesses in the cryptocurrency industry.
“It’s on the very early side of infrastructure,” Nanu said. “Nium, in the end, is a layer on top of a lot of banks in the world.”
“Banks have gone from, crypto is hot, to not crypto, to crypto. It’s not one shoe fits all,” he added.
That is in spite of a sharp increase in the price of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, which have surged due to rekindled investor interest after the U.S. approved spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds.
In the past 12 months, the price of bitcoin has increased by around 150%.
