Fintech Payoneer is buying 5-year-old global payroll startup Skuad for $61M in cash
New York-based fintech Payoneer has acquired Skuad, a Singapore-based global HR and payroll startup, for $61 million in cash, the company exclusively told TechCrunch.
Payoneer said it could also pay up to another $10 million, contingent on if Skuad meets various performance goals within the first 18 months of the acquisition. Payoneer also committed to grant $10 million in restricted stock units which are subject to vesting contingent on continued employment of key personnel. So all told, Payoneer could pay as much as around $81 million.
That’s a fairly fast exit for Skuad founder Sundeep Sahi, who launched the company in 2019 with the aim of simplifying international hiring. The company’s focus has since been on helping small-to-medium-sized employers in over 160 countries (with over 100 currencies) deal with issues that make building distributed teams challenging, like variations in regulations from market to market, international payrolls and remote onboarding.
It had raised about $19 million in venture funding from investors such as Beenext, Anthemis, NMVM, Argor Capital and several angel investors prior to getting acquired.
Payoneer is a provider of cross-border payment services to about 2 million businesses in over 190 countries and territories. It has a market cap of nearly $2.5 billion.
Both Payoneer and Skuad are geared toward SMBs that operate internationally, particularly in emerging markets, while other larger payroll management startups such as Deel and Rippling “tend to focus on larger companies and enterprises,” Payoneer CEO John Caplan said.
Payoneer has more than 2,150 employees. Skuad has about 200 employees, all of whom are joining Payoneer as part of the acquisition, according to Caplan. He declined to reveal financials for Skuad, saying only it had a “high growth recurring revenue model.” For its part, Payoneer also announced Wednesday record revenue of $240 million, up 16% year-over-year.
“One of the biggest opportunities Payoneer is pursuing is capturing share in the $6 trillion B2B market. SMBs around the world are tapping into global opportunity by exporting goods and services across borders. For example, BPOs in the Philippines, marketing agencies in the UAE, beauty product exporters in South Korea, etc.,” Caplan told TechCrunch. BPO refers to business process outsourcing, as the Philippines is known for call-center and other IT support services.
“Remote work is here to stay in a post-pandemic world. Companies are under increasing pressure to reduce labor costs. And we see a shift from individual freelancer models to companies who are looking for more scalable solutions,” Caplan said.
Payoneer plans to integrate Skuad’s payroll and contract management offering into its own offering.
With the fintech market hurting from the venture capital slowdown, acquisitions among players have grown. As of mid-April, there had been 159 transactions announced or completed so far in 2024, similar to the pace of last year, according to Capstone Partners.
Payoneer, which went public in 2021 via a SPAC merger backed by fintech entrepreneur Betsy Cohen (founder of Bancorp) has emerged as one of the buyers. In August 2023, Payoneer announced that it was buying AI data startup Spott and that it had also bought a payments company licensed to do business in China in a deal that’s expected to close later this year. And in 2019, Payoneer acquired a German payments startup called optile.
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