A Fintech Billion
Fintech (financial technology) is a sector which has flourished in recent years, with technology revolutionising how we spend, save and receive money in the 21st century.
Many of the fintech startups that have popped up in the last couple of decades have already gone on to see great success, with numerous fintech firms hitting a valuation of $1 billion.
For some, it’s been a long journey to reach that billion-dollar mark, adapting and diversifying over the years, but for others, the rise has been meteoric.
We’ve looked at 100 of the biggest fintech companies in the world, to see just how long it took them to reach a valuation of $1 billion.
Not only did payments company Brex become a billion-dollar company in less than two years, but what’s even more impressive is the fact that their owners were just 22 years old at the time. Brazilian-born owners Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi met when they were 16 and founded Brex in January 2017, before announcing a $125 million Series C funding in October 2018, at a valuation of $1.1 billion.
Figure Technologies founder Mike Cagney has a knack for quickly creating billion-dollar companies, having done so with SoFi in just four years, before leaving and doing the same at Figure in less than two years. Figure is a blockchain lending startup which was founded in early 2018, smashing the billion-dollar mark in December 2019, with a $103 million Series C round of funding, which took it to $225 million raised in total and a valuation of $1.2 billion.
Of the 100 fintech companies that we looked at, four took over two decades to reach the billion-dollar mark, and in most cases, have adapted through the years as technology has changed. The firm which had the longest road to $1bn was Radius Payment Solutions, from the north of England, where they provide fuel card and payment services to small and medium fleet sectors. Radius started out in 1990 and finally reached a billion-dollar valuation in 2017.
The fintech company with the second-longest journey to a billion was also based in the UK, BGL Group. While they started out as a traditional insurance company in 1992, they became one of the first to use an online matchmaking comparison service, hitting the billion-dollar benchmark in 2017, after a quarter of a century.
Pine Labs initially launched in 1998 as a card-based payment solution to the petroleum industry but pivoted their business in 2012 to focus on creating software for point of sale machines and finally reached a $1 billion valuation earlier this year.
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Looking across each of the 100 companies that we analysed, the average time taken to reach that magical $1 billion mark fell at 7 years and 2 months, which is still a very quick time to turn a business from a brand new startup to a billion-dollar enterprise, showing just how quickly the world’s top fintech firms are finding their feet and making a success of things.
Of the 100 fintech companies that we looked at, almost half (46%) were based in the USA, with 13 founded in China and 10 in the UK.
Of those which were home to more than one fintech company, those in Australia had the quickest journey to $1bn, doing so in four years, on average, while those in the Netherlands took 14.
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