NIUM

The origin story is refreshingly petty. Prajit Nanu was trying to send money abroad for a friend's wedding and found the whole process slow, expensive and infuriating.

In 2014 he teamed up with Michael Bermingham and Pratik Gandhi and launched InstaReM in Singapore. It started as a consumer app for cheaper cross-border remittances.

But the founders realized the bigger money was in powering other businesses, not chasing individual customers. So they rebuilt the company into an engine other firms could plug into.

In 2019 they rebranded from InstaReM to Nium to signal the shift.

Nium moves money across borders for businesses so they do not have to build the plumbing themselves. Picture a bank, a fintech app or a payroll company that needs to pay people in dozens of countries.

Instead of stitching together local bank connections everywhere, they plug into Nium's rails. Nium holds licenses in more than 40 markets and reaches over 190 countries.

It makes money on transaction fees and currency exchange. In plain terms, it is the pipes behind other companies' international payments.

Nium's core product is its global payments platform, a set of tools other companies use to send and receive money across borders. It offers payouts to more than 190 countries.

It issues virtual and physical cards, so a business can launch its own branded card program. It also handles collections, letting companies get paid in local currencies around the world.

Basically, if money needs to cross a border for a business, Nium wants to be the layer underneath it.

The smart move was going business-to-business. Consumer remittance is a brutal, low-margin knife fight against giants.

By 2019 Nium had pivoted to selling its payment rails to other companies, which is stickier and pays better. It also chased licenses aggressively, grabbing regulatory approval in market after market.

Those licenses act as a moat, meaning a wall competitors cannot easily climb, because getting them is slow and painful. Today Nium processes tens of billions of dollars in payments every year.

Cross-border payments is a shark tank. Nium is up against Wise, Airwallex, Stripe and the banks, all fighting for the same business.

Margins on moving money are thin, so scale is everything. Nium also has to keep regulators happy in dozens of countries at once.

One compliance slip in the wrong market can get very expensive. After the 2021 boom it also has to grow into a valuation that jumped to $1.4 billion.

The rails are built. Now it has to fill them with enough volume to justify the hype.

Nium's cap table reads like a who's who of payments money. The big one came in July 2021, when Riverwood Capital led a Series D of more than $200 million.

That round pushed Nium past a $1 billion valuation and made it the first B2B payments unicorn from Southeast Asia. Temasek, Visa and Vertex Ventures joined in.

Yes, Visa, which competes with parts of what Nium does, also put money in. Nium later raised a $50 million Series E that lifted its valuation to $1.4 billion.

In total it has raised around $300 million.