Nium cuts valuation by 30% during funding round, aiming for 2025 IPO

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands – Financial technology startup Nium told CNBC on Wednesday that it has raised $50 million in new funding from investors and is targeting an initial public offering in the next 18 months.

The fundraising round was led by an undisclosed Southeast Asian sovereign wealth fund. It places Nium’s valuation at $1.4 billion.

That represents a 30% discount to the previous valuation of $2 billion, which the company recorded in 2022 when it last raised external venture capital.

Prajit Nanu, CEO and founder of Nium, said the company would use the new capital to double down on M&A and focus on other growth-stage payments companies.

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

Fintechs have seen their share prices fall in recent years due to macroeconomic pressures, including high inflation and rising interest rates.

“To be realistic, when we raised interest in early 2022, the public markets suffered,” Nanu said. “The public markets have not been kind to fintech.”

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

He added that valuation is not an issue for him and that it does not matter what the company prices its shares at as markets are naturally volatile.

“Whether you go public at $1 billion, $5 billion, it doesn’t matter. Because the appreciation only happens when you’re bought, or when you go through an IPO,” he said.

He cited the example of Stripe, which fetched a $95 billion valuation in the heady days of 2021 before cutting its value to $50 billion and then boosting its valuation to $65 billion in secondary equity deals.

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

Nanu said he is not interested in acquiring companies in the cryptocurrency space, as he is not doing yeta see merchant demand for crypto as a payment method.

“It’s at the very early end of infrastructure,” Nanu said. “Nium is ultimately a layer on top of many banks in the world.”

“Banks have gone from crypto is hot to non-crypto to crypto,” he added. “It’s not one shoe that fits all.”

That’s despite a boom in the prices of cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, which have risen thanks to renewed investor interest following the approval of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds in the US.

Bitcoin has seen its price rise by approximately 150% over the past twelve months.