Marqeta lands $4.3bn valuation thanks to mystery investor
by Ruby HinchliffeMarqeta, the California-based card-issuing platform, has landed $150 million from an undisclosed investor, valuing the company at $4.3 billion.
The company announced the fresh funding on 28 May and marks a rapid increase in value since its $260 million round of Series E funding in March 2019, which valued the company at $2 billion.
Marqeta provides cards, wallets and other payment tools to customers as big as Square, Uber, Instacart and DoorDash.
Yet to become profitable, Marqeta’s founder and CEO Jason Gardner tells TechCrunch, “we see ourselves as a public company”.
“We’re finding that fintech is eating the world,” Gardner adds. “I think the idea of payments are going to change. You’re going to see more ecommerce and that leads to curbside pickup and touchless payments.”
Whilst the identity of Marqeta’s latest investor is still a mystery, investors in the fintech’s previous funding round included Goldman Sachs, CommerzVentures, Visa, Coatue Management, and US-based early stage venture firm Spark Capital.
The new capital brings the company over $500 million in total funding raised since it was founded in 2010. By the end of last year, Marqeta said it had issued more than 140 million cards through its platform.
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“We see Marqeta becoming an indispensable part of the global payments infrastructure, and we’re in a solid position to realize that vision for our company,” Gardner said in a written statement.
“This new capital helps us accelerate our mission to empower builders to bring the most innovative products to market, wherever they are in the world.”
In a research project commissioned by Marqeta, Edgar, Dunn & Company found that the global modern card issuing market is expected to grow by $30 trillion in the next decade, becoming an $80 trillion opportunity.
Last October, Marqeta partnered with global card issuer Visa to help fintechs and multi-national card programmes expand across the Asia Pacific region, launching ‘digital-first card programmes’ in 10 Asia Pacific markets.
The programmes, designed to give developers access to Marqeta’s existing sandbox and publicly available application programme interfaces (APIs), marked at “a major step in expanding Marqeta’s global footprint,” according to CEO Gardner.
“Bringing Marqeta and Visa technology together like this in Asia-Pacific is creating an entirely new product proposition, at a scale that hasn’t been done before,” Gardner said at the time.