It is official, Softbank leads $800 million investment into Revolut, a UK-based challenger bank.
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This has driven the value of Revolut to $33 billion, which is six times its previous valuation that was estimated at $5.5 billion last year.
Revolut is now the most valuable fintech in the UK, as well as one of the biggest of the privately-backed scaled-up startups not just in Europe, but the world.
SoftBank Vision Fund 2 has also backed firms such as Uber Technologies and the buy-now-pay-later Swedish giant Klarna, which is the most valuable FinTech so far.
Klarna reached a $45.6bn valuation on the back of a $639m SoftBank-led funding round in June.
Revolut will use the obtained investments mainly for product development and marketing in the countries to which it is expanding, especially in the USA and India.
CFO Mikko Salovaara told reporters that despite Revolut posting massive growth over the past year, the company has no immediate plans for an initial public offering.
Salovaara said that Revolut did not rule out a potential IPO this year but suggested it was unlikely.
Revolut generated revenues of £261 million ($361 million) in 2020. This means Revolut made 57% more compared to the £166 million revenue it made a year earlier.
However, the operating losses (which also consist of crypto revaluation income but not from share-based payments) of £122 million mean a sharp increase from the £98.4 million loss in 2019.
“As the extraordinary circumstances of 2020 drove the trend towards digital financial management we continued to innovate for customers to make their financial lives easier and accelerate daily use. We launched 24 new retail and business products, expanded into the US, Japan and Australia and launched banking services in Lithuania, all while significantly improving our profitability,” founder and CEO Nikolay Storonsky said in a statement.
