Finix, the payments infrastructure platform, today announced a $17.5 million Series A funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from Insight Venture Partners, Aspect Ventures and Visa. They are joined by existing investors Homebrew, Precursor Ventures and Act One Ventures. Built by a team with deep technology and financial services expertise, Finix is redefining the economics of payments by giving businesses full ownership of their payments stack. The investment brings Finix's total capital raised to more than $20 million, and will accelerate the company's product development and sales efforts worldwide. Matt Harris, a partner at Bain Capital Ventures, has also joined the Finix board of directors.

Payments is emerging as a new strategic imperative for businesses looking to generate more revenue and deliver a better customer experience. However, bringing payments in-house is extremely complicated and expensive, taking multiple years and costing millions of dollars on average. The alternative to building your own payments stack until now has been to outsource the payments experience to a third party payment facilitator. That approach doesn't scale well for businesses processing more than $50-100 million in annual transaction volume, forcing them to relinquish control over user experience and taking considerable revenue potential off the table.

Finix is a payments infrastructure platform that gives businesses a better way to own, manage and monetize their entire payments experience without the headaches or expenses associated with building an in-house system from scratch.

"Payments technology has reached an exciting tipping point," said Richie Serna, chief executive officer and co-founder at Finix. "What companies like Lyft, Airbnb and MindBody all have in common beyond their high valuations is payments: they have each built their own payments stack. Our mission is to provide the foundation for the next generation of multi-billion dollar payments businesses by empowering them to become payment facilitators in months, not years."

With Finix, businesses can become a payment facilitator in as little as two months, and at a fraction of the $3 million - $5 million average cost of building a system in-house. Because Finix is available on a fixed pricing model, customers don't have to forfeit any basis points. Finix gives payments teams the flexibility to configure the perfect payments stack for their unique business needs with easy-to-use APIs and dashboards. With Finix, growing businesses can deliver a seamless payments experience to customers and conveniently manage their entire provider ecosystem through a single platform of record. The Finix platform is SOC I and SOC II, PCI-Level 1 and GDPR compliant.

"Payments is a $2 trillion industry that remains stubbornly fragmented across consumers, merchants and processors," said Matt Harris, managing director at Bain Capital Ventures. "This is starting to change, as more and more traditional software companies are bringing payments in house. The billion-dollar payments company of the future won't look like Stripe or Square. It will be a vertically-focused software company with payments integrated deeply into its core. Finix has built a compelling solution that makes this process easier and more cost-effective than any other option on the market."

"As we move into the next wave of payments innovation, we're excited to continue our collaboration with Finix to enable seamless, real-time[1] disbursements," said Vikram Modi, Vice President and Head, Visa Direct Global Platform. "Through this collaboration, we continue to provide simpler and faster payout solutions that can be made available for consumers and small businesses around the world."

Finix was founded in 2015 by Richie Serna and Sean Donovan who combined their unique expertise on emerging technologies and the payments industry to build a more efficient payments facilitation solution.