Paddle raises USD 200 mln to supercharge SaaS payments

Paddle works with more than 3,000 software customers in 200 markets, where it provides a platform for them to set up and sell their SaaS products in those regions, primarily in a B2B model. Due to many consumer services also sold these days in SaaS models, its ambitions include a significant expansion of that to areas like in-app payments.

Payments has long been a complicated and fragmented business in the digital world: banking practices, preferred payment methods, and regulations differ depending on the market in question, and each stage of taking and clearing payments typically involves piecing together a chain of providers, according to the press release.

Paddle positions itself as a merchant of record that has built a set of services around the specific needs of businesses that sell software online, covering checkout, payment, subscription management, invoicing, international taxes, and financial compliance processes.

Sold as a SaaS itself, basic pricing is 5% + 50 cents per transaction, Paddle’s premise follows the principle of other business tools: payments is typically not a core competency of, say, a video conferencing or security company (one of its customers is BlueJeans, now owned by Verizon, which used to own TechCrunch; another is Fortinet).

The company believes that there is a business to be made in bringing together the many complicated parts of providing a billing and payments service into a single product specifically tailored to software businesses. It does not disclose actual revenues or specific usage numbers, but notes that revenue growth has doubled over the last since 2021.