Earlybird et al. back Traxpay

Harriet Bailey
24 September 2014

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Commerzbank has led a $15m series-B funding round in payments company Traxpay, with participation from existing investor Earlybird Venture Capital.

Enterprise management software provider Software, based in Germany, also invested in the oversubscribed round, alongside Castik Capital Partners. Castik was established by former senior Apax partner, Michael Phillips, in May this year. Castik has held a €625m first close on the firm's inaugural fund, which has a €1bn target.

Earlybird stated it saw space for consolidation in the highly fragmented B2B payment market and Traxpay was addressing the large transactional core of the payment supply chain.

Traxpay also announced a new partnership with MasterCard to connect buyers and suppliers. The funding is set to be used in tandem with the collaboration to expand Traxpay's technology capabilities.

According to the payments service provider, the B2B commerce market is worth $377tn worldwide and businesses spend nearly $1tn in fees to intermediaries to facilitate payments.

Previous funding
Earlybird invested approximately $3.2m in Traxpay in June 2012 for a 25% stake. Three business angels and a strategic investor, who divided up a 15% stake between them, also participated in the $4m series-A round. The management team retained the remainder.

At the time, Earlybird stated it had evaluated 10 companies before deciding to invest in Traxpay.

Company
Founded in 2009 and headquartered in Frankfurt, Traxpay has developed a real-time payment platform for B2B companies. It began selling its product to customers in early 2012, the same year it opened a US office in Silicon Valley, California.

Traxpay's B2B Dynamic Payments platform provides secure bank-grade and regulation compliant B2B payments services to corporations, digital marketplaces and B2B commerce networks. It combines transaction banking, enterprise data and trade networks into one platform.

People
John Bruggeman is CEO of Traxpay. Hany Fam is president of MasterCard Enterprise Partnerships. Jason Whitmire is partner at Earlybird. Holger Werner is head of corporate banking at Commerzbank. Frederic Hanika is head of M&A and corporate ventures at Software.