Nium cuts valuation by 30% in funding round and plans to IPO in 2025

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands — Fintech startup Nium told CNBC on Wednesday it has raised $50 million in new funding from investors and plans to launch an initial public offering within the next 18 months.

The fundraising round was led by an unknown Southeast Asian sovereign wealth fund. Nium is valued at $1.4 billion.

That marks a 30 percent discount from the previous $2 billion valuation the company received in 2022, the last time it raised outside venture capital.

Prajit Nanu, CEO and founder of Nium, said the firm will use the new capital to double down on mergers and acquisitions efforts, targeting other growth-stage payments companies.

Nanu said his company’s decline was the result of a broader depression in the valuations of fintech companies in the public market.

Fintech stock prices have fallen in recent years as a result of macroeconomic pressures, including high inflation and rising interest rates.

“To be realistic, when we raised funds in early 2022, the public markets wiped it out,” Nanu said. “Public markets have not been kind to fintech.”

Nanu said that despite the lower valuation, he remains optimistic about Nium’s growth and is confident the company will go public in the next 18 months, targeting a listing in the third or fourth quarter of 2025.

He added that valuation doesn’t bother him and that it doesn’t matter what a company prices its shares at because markets are inherently volatile.

“It doesn’t matter whether you go public at $1 billion or $5 billion. Because the valuation only happens when you get bought or when you go public,” he said.

He cited the example of Stripe, which raised its valuation to $95 billion in the heady days of 2021, before reducing its value to $50 billion and then boosting its valuation to $65 billion through secondary stock deals.

Any Nium IPO would be a boon for its investors, which include venture capital firms BOND, NewView Capital and Tribe Capital.

Nanu said he is not interested in acquiring companies in the cryptocurrency space because he has not done so yet. see the demand of merchants for cryptocurrency as a payment method.

“This is in the very early stages of infrastructure development,” Nanu said. “Nium, after all, is a superstructure on top of many of the world’s banks.”

“Banks have gone from cryptocurrency being trendy to not cryptocurrency being trendy,” he added. “It’s not one shoe that fits all.”

This is despite huge gains in the prices of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, which have surged amid renewed investor interest following the approval of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds in the US.

Over the past 12 months, the price of Bitcoin has increased by approximately 150%.