At a time when Alberto Dalmasso and Satispay have started to tackle the French market, their fourth in Europe, the fundraising will allow them to accelerate. Photo: Satispay

At a time when Alberto Dalmasso and Satispay have started to tackle the French market, their fourth in Europe, the fundraising will allow them to accelerate. Photo: Satispay

Satispay has become the second Italian unicorn (in euros) after raising €320m in a round of financing. The investors are led by Addition and include the Chinese Tencent and Jack Dorsey's (the founder of Twitter) fund, Block.

Addition is the young American venture capital company headed by Lee Fixel, and has taken Freshworks to a valuation of $10bn and Roblox to $42 bn. Satispay's €320m round was also subscribed by the Chinese company Tencent; Jack Dorsey's Block (formerly Square), which first backed Satispay in its 2020 Series C; Greyhound Capital, which has already been present since 2018 and also has Revolut and N26 in its portfolio; US fund Coatue (also in Monzo, N26 and Checkout.com); Lightrock and Mediolanum Gestione Fondi, an Italian investment company.

The fundraising propels the Italian fintech to the highly honoured status of a unicorn (a company worth more than a billion dollars), but in euros.

Twice the revenue in 2021

The Luxembourg subsidiary of the Italian-born fintech, which arrived in Luxembourg in 2018 and is still headquartered there, has obtained its e-money licence... but is still making a loss. In 2021, it ended the year with a deficit of €3.5m, adding to the €6.5m in losses accumulated so far despite a booming turnover, which doubled in one year from €2.3m to €5.26m last year.

"We started in the middle of the pandemic in 2020 and quickly garnered interest from independent shops and consumers," says the co-founder and CEO of the young company, Alberto Dalmasso. "Since then, the number of new users and merchants has continued to grow. This confirms the success we have in Italy, where today we have over three million users who take advantage of our payment features every day. We have always considered Luxembourg as the gateway to French-speaking countries and we have just launched the service in some of the cities in France.”

From 300 to 600 employees within 18 months

The comany’s three million customers are mainly Italian for now, despite the fintech's strong advertising on cashback. Potential customers can get cashback if they use this new payment method without any activation or monthly fees for merchants, who only pay a 20 cent commission for payments over 10 euros. According to the press release, 200,000 merchants (including 350 in Luxembourg) use Satispay in Italy, Luxembourg and Germany.

To get an idea of its traction, it already had 1.8 million consumers and 160,000 merchants in the three countries a year ago, when it launched its new service – the integration of loyalty cards from merchants using its technology.

Satispay plans to double its workforce from 300 to 600 over the next 18 months, hiring in its four offices (Milan, Berlin, Luxembourg and France), as per an interview the founder gave to Sifted ahead of the release.

In another interview with TechCrunch, Dalmasso also says he is seriously considering developing a "buy now pay later" approach. According to him, customers use his app for 10 to 18 transactions per month.

At the beginning of the year, Satispay registered a second company in Luxembourg, Satispay International, under a three-man management board. The board consists of Samuele Pinta who is Satispay’s CFO, Andrea Prencipe as the chairman of the board of Luxembourg's Satispay Europe and Giorgio Ponticelli as the COO.

In February, Scalapay became the first Italian unicorn after a $497m round of financing, again largely led by the Chinese Tencent and Tiger (Lee Fixel's first fund).

This article was originally published on and has been translated and edited for Delano.

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