Aussie A2A Merchant Payments Startup Zepto Notches A$25M

Account-to-account (A2A) merchant payments startup Zepto raised A$25 million in a Series A funding round led by AirTree Ventures and Decade Partners, as it plans expansion into international markets, according to a press release on Monday (March 28).

Zepto CEO Chris Jewell said that the company is fortunate to have AirTree Ventures and Decade Partners as its initial outside backers.

“From our roots as a bootstrapped Byron Bay upstart, Zepto has grown to become a market leader in the payments industry. We intend to use this capital to grow our team and technology in a meaningful, empowering way as we meet the demands of an ever-evolving domestic market, as well as accelerate our expansion into international markets,” Jewell said.

Founded in 2018 by CTO Trevor Wistaff, Executive Director of Partnerships Matthew Cheers, Director Adrian Kennedy, and Executive Director of Solutions Ian Lennie, the startup was formerly known as Split Payments until August 2021. The four entrepreneurs previously founded a skydiving business and decided to launch a new company after experiencing frustrations with payment systems in place for businesses. 

Related: Australian Regulator Rebuffs Updates to ePayments Code

Zepto has experienced 10-times year-on-year revenue growth annually since launching and now facilitates over $4 billion in payment volume monthly. The company now counts big companies as clients, such as Binance Australia, Superhero, Novatti Group, Nimble, Powerpay, Till Payments, Bluestone, Rentbetter, Biz Pay and Get Blys. 

Zepto CCO Carolyn Breeze said the support of investors is “validation that we were on the right track … feedback was so positive, it inspired us to aim even higher.”

She added that the conversations with investors “got heightened and more intense as we went along. It was clear they were investing, not just in the business, but in the people within it.”

With about 100 employees, Zepto will also use the fresh capital to grow its staff, drive domestic growth and build out its payment infrastructure with additional capabilities. 

At the end of last year, Zepto became the first non-bank granted permission to directly connect to Australia’s New Payments Platform (NPP) as a connected institution, the company said in an earlier blog post. It is also the first non-bank payments provider that is deemed an Accredited Data Recipient (ADR) under the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s Consumer Data Right (CDR).

“The global payments landscape is in the middle of its biggest upheaval in decades, as open banking and real-time, bank-to-bank payments are transforming how we pay and get paid. With open banking and the NPP, Australia has found itself at the center of this disruption – and Zepto is the leading innovator in this space,” said James Cameron, Partner at AirTree Ventures.