Checkout.com, a little-known payments start-up, has raised Europe’s biggest ever Series A funding round for a fintech, knocking OakNorth off the top spot.

It is also the third largest Series A fintech funding round globally of all time.

The seven-year-old London-based payments group has raised $230m (£177m) from investors including Insight Partners and DST Global, putting it in the ranks of unicorns — tech companies with valuations of more than $1bn.

Checkout.com acts as a middleman between merchants and payment services such as Visa, Mastercard, Apple Pay and PayPal. Customers include Virgin Active., Deliveroo, Getty Images,TransferWise and Samsung. It provides payments solutions in more thatn 150 currencies.

Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, Blossom Capital, Endeavor Catalyst also participated in the round.

The scale-up will use the funding to continue its rapid growth in Europe, the US and the Middle East, with further expansion into Asia and Latin America.

Tripling staff

The company has nearly 200 staff based in London and 345 staff worldwide in eight offices. Its team is expected to triple over the next three years.

Founder and sole shareholder Guillaume Pousaz said: “We have been fortunate to have some of the world’s leading investors approach us for some time but our focus has remained on building the very best suite of products we can for our merchants on four continents. Having built a sustainable business, one hire at a time, it was crucial to find partners that share our vision of how enterprise businesses will consume financial services in the future. We have anticipated this from our early days and have designed Checkout.com’s platform from the outset so that we can easily deliver incremental services to our customers as the company expands its offering.”

Tom Stafford, managing partner, DST Global, added: “Payments are a critical component of any online business. With the digital payments market expected to grow to $6 trillion by 2021, we believe Checkout.com can expand rapidly through its technology-driven and customer-centric payments solution.”