After a pivot into mobile payments, Ingogo has raised $9.1 million in a pre-IPO funding round.
The new funding will help Ingogo launch a mobile payment and accounting platform for small and medium businesses, in partnership with Xero. Ingogo had announced the evolution from its original taxi hailing app in August.
The Australian startup is now valued at $45 million and has raised $16.2 million in total capital. Based on the past month’s trading, Ingogo is processing an annual equivalent of more than $100 million in taxi payments. Petrie said this represents about 10 per cent of the incumbent Cabcharge’s payment volume annually.
Ingogo has stated plans to list on the ASX in the first half of 2015.
The startup’s latest funding round was led by UBS and Canaccord Genuity. With the addition of Chris Lee and Craig Winkler as investors, Ingogo now has three MYOB co-founders backing the startup. The other is Brad Shofer.
“This funding is a significant step for ingogo, and we are proud to show that funding rounds at this level can be done here in Australia,” said the startup’s founder, Hamish Petrie.
Ingogo also tapped into crowdfunding. The round was the first deal for VentureCrowd, an equity-based crowdfunding platform set up by Artesian Venture Partners. VentureCrowd contributed $1.2 million from about 50 pre-qualified individual investors.
“The response was amazing, with applications significantly oversubscribed, demonstrating that VentureCrowd is a robust, viable investment platform for startups and investors,” said Tim Heasley, COO of Artesian Venture Partners.
Also, Ingogo announced three new members to its board. Martin Dalgleish – who has served on several boards including Foxtel, Hoyts and SEEK – will be chairman. Shofer, co-founder of MYOB and a significant shareholder in Xero, and Naseema Sparks, chairman of DealsDirect, will serve as non-executive directors.
The beta for Ingogo’s Xero payment integration will be launched by the end of October with a full commercial version set to launch in early 2015, Ingogo said.
Adam Bender covers telco and enterprise tech issues for Computerworld and is the author of dystopian sci-fi novels We, The Watched and Divided We Fall. Follow him on Twitter: @WatchAdam
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