On October 19, 2022, UPSIDER, a provider of a corporate card and BNPL service for enterprises
announced that it has closed debt financing of 46.7 billion yen ($312.5M).
UPSIDER is a startup co-founded in 2018 by Toru Miyagi, the CEO of UPSIDER, after working on company-wide transformation projects for major financial institutions, such as formulating digital strategies for bank open APIs, etc., and optimizing fee structures and branch locations at McKinsey & Company's Tokyo and London offices, where he joined as a new graduate after graduating from Tokyo University. Based on his knowledge and experience in this area, he co-founded this startup in 2018 with COO Mizuno (former head of marketing at Userbase, Inc.)
The company's UPSIDER is a corporate card that solves financial issues such as credit limits and accounting processes. In particular, it provides companies with virtual credit card with credit limit of up to 100 million yen or more (prepaid or postpaid) and accounting SaaS. The active user is more than several thousand, and the retention rate is 99%.
The business was initially developed as a corporate card for startups, but with the release of card usage restrictions, authorization setting functions, and Slack integration functions, the company has been able to operate corporate cards more securely than ever before, and the number of listed company clients has also been increasing rapidly.
支払い.com, which the company also offers to sole proprietors and corporates, is a service that allows users to settle all bank transfer payments for business-to-business transactions with their own credit cards. By extending payment to the credit card debit date, users can improve their cash flow. In addition, users do not need to submit any documents, meet with any person, or undergo any screening process.
UPSIDER announced on October 19, 2022, that it has closed debt financing through an additional line of credit with four major financial institutions (undisclosed) as underwriters, raising 46.7 billion yen. As a financial platform that supports all challengers, the company will continue to encourage as many people as possible to succeed as quickly and as greatly as possible, and create a society where all challengers are freed from financial worries and can accelerate their challenges.
The company explains the background of this fundraising as follows:
The cumulative settlement scale of the corporate card "UPSIDER" and the BNPL service for businesses "支払い.com" exceeds 50 billion yen, and the number of new customers recently acquired exceeds 1,000 per month, while the number of customers is over 5,000. Although it has only been two years since the launch of the service, we have been able to secure this additional loan facility not only because of our service expansion track record, but also because of the high accuracy of our unique screening scoring system. With the mission of "creating a society where people who take on challenges can play an active role", we support the growth of companies from a financial perspective by providing the corporate card "UPSIDER" and the BNPL service "支払い.com". The funds raised this time will be invested for further service expansion.
UPSIDER’s company profile is here:
http://protocol.ooo/en/companies/upsider