On Wednesday, payment processing startup SpotOn announced that it raised $60 million in a Series C funding round led by DST Global.
This new funding round comes just six months after its $50 million Series B round in March. But needless to say, a lot has changed since then.
SpotOn develops hardware and software to help facilitate point-of-sale transactions for small- to medium-sized businesses like restaurants, bars, brick-and-mortar retail shops and salons. These businesses have been hit especially hard by the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. As a result, many have had to go out of business.
Since these businesses are SpotOn’s main customers, this looked like bad news for the startup. And at first, SpotOn felt the effects, with sales dropping in April. But those sales numbers bounced back in May and soon after the company was hitting new records.
SpotOn offers a whole ecosystem for its customers to process payments, which goes beyond just building payment terminals. SpotOn can also help its customers build websites, launch online marketing campaigns, handle reviews and more. It was these services that proved to be a boon as restaurants and retail shops had to adjust quickly to operating mostly online.
“It puts a lot of pressure on you if you really care about your merchants. There were days we were working 14 hours straight to offer things like online ordering. We had to create all these products just so they could survive,” co-founder and product head Doron Friedman told Built In. “We went from processing a small amount of online ordering to handling millions and millions of dollars in transactions a month later.”
SpotOn soon recognized this pattern, and invested its resources into developing more tech-enabled omni-channel products. This year, the company was able to offer services like SpotOn Reserve, which handles taking appointments and reservations. It can also text a customer when a business is ready for them, so the customer doesn’t have to wait idly in line. This sort of technology can be a big help as businesses have to operate with capacity restrictions and follow social distancing guidelines.
The company is also beta testing programs that allow retail locations do local delivery. While restaurants have been offering local delivery services for a while, SpotOn wants to help brick-and-mortar retailers do the same.
This new round of funding will help the company further develop new products and grow as a whole. The company has grown to over 1,000 employees in the past three years, across offices in Chicago, Mexico City, Detroit, Denver, Krakow and its headquarters in SF. The company estimates that it’ll have 1,500 employees by the end of next year.
