Cloud POS ‘Payhere’ raises KRW 20 billion in Series B funding
Reading Time: 2 minutesSouth Korea-based fintech startup Payhere announced that it has raised KRW 20 billion in Series B funding. The total amount of cumulative investment has exceeded KRW 35 billion.
The investment was led by Silicon Valley-based venture capital (VC) Goodwater Capital, with new participation from Smilegate Investment, and follow-up investments from existing investors SoftBank Ventures and Hashed Ventures. This comes a year after the company closed a KRW 12 billion Series A round in March last year.
Payhere started as a cloud-based POS (point-of-sale) service in 2020. Users can download and use the app on any device, including mobile phones, tablets, and laptops. In particular, the POS function, which was limited to restaurants, was subdivided according to the industry and scale, such as cafes, restaurants, wholesale and retail, service industry, and franchises, to improve user convenience.
It solved the physical and functional limitations of the existing large POS devices that were fixed on the counter in the cloud, and lowered the barrier to entry for business with easy usage and reasonable fees. Within a year of its launch, it has surpassed the largest number of merchants in the industry and is used in more than 35,000 stores nationwide.
As a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that allows users to select and subscribe to the features they want at the point-of-sale (POS) screen, there are endless possibilities for expansion. Payhere brings together scattered store management services such as delivery, marketing, kiosks, waiting, table ordering, and KDS (kitchen display system), and all orders, payments, and customer data in one place.
Payhere also integrates with other services such as NAVER reservations, serving robots, cooking robots, and health platforms to solve customer pain points and improve usability for businesses of different sizes and industries. In Q2, the company plans to introduce a POS with more advanced inventory and option management capabilities for wholesale and retail businesses such as apparel, stationery, and groceries.
“Advances in technology are changing the behavior and expectations of all consumers. To compete, small businesses need to offer an omnichannel experience that spans online and offline, but the services are fragmented and make running a store more complex. PayHere is solving this critical problem and has experienced impressive growth that exceeds global benchmarks. We’re excited to support the team as they immerse themselves in making life easier for the self-employed.”said Jinseok Oh, Partner at Goodwater Capital, who led the investment.
“Payhere has already proven its excellence and reliability with many self-employed people and storefronts,” said Inwoo Kang, Head of Smilegate Investment. “As an integrated store management platform that provides all the features needed to start a business and run a store, it is highly scalable, which is why we decided to invest.”
“The PayHere team started by paying attention to offline stores that no one else was paying attention to, and creating technology for the self-employed,” said Junki Park, CEO of PayHere. “We will continue to solve the problems and concerns of business owners, such as staffing, labor costs, promotion, and sales, and help them run their stores more easily and conveniently.”
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