Ripple’s fintech partner Nium cuts valuation by 30%

Singapore-headquartered cross-border payments firm Nium has raised $50 million in a new funding round, marking a 30% discount to its previous valuation.

Ripple‘s payment partner Nium has cut its valuation by 30% in its latest $50 million Series E funding round led by an undisclosed Southeast Asian sovereign wealth fund. As per a blog announcement, the latest funding, which was supported by venture capital firms like BOND, NewView Capital, and Tribe Capital, valued the Singapore-headquartered firm at $1.4 billion, down 30% from $2 billion in 2022.

The proceeds will be used to further accelerate the firm’s growth plans, Nium says, adding that it wants to fuel its global network expansion, accelerate product innovation, expand staff, and pursue mergers and acquisitions activity.

“Our investors believe in our long-term mission of building the payments infrastructure for on-demand money movement and this additional investment will allow us to accelerate our aspirations.”

Nium CEO Prajit Nanu

In a commentary to CNBC, Nanu admitted the decreased valuation, saying the decline was the result of a “broader depression in public market valuations of fintech companies.”

“Being realistic, when we raised in early 2022, public markets were killing it. The public markets have not been kind to fintech.”

Prajit Nanu

Despite the reduced valuation, Nium remains committed to its plans of going public next year. Although these plans weren’t mentioned in the official blog post, Nanu told CNBC that he is still optimistic about Nium’s growth and confident that the company will go public within the next 18 months, targeting an IPO in Q3-Q4 of 2025.

“Whether you go public at $1 billion, $5 billion, it doesn’t matter. Because the valuation is only when you get bought, or when you go through an IPO.”

Prajit Nanu

Founded in 2014 by Prajit Nanu and Michael Bermingham, Nium is a cross-border remittances platform for overseas money transfers with close-to-live exchange rates. In early 2018, Nium partnered with Ripple to use the company’s RippleNet solution to offer payment corridors from North and South America into a number of destinations in Southeast Asia.