Seattle based digital remittance company raised $85m in new funding at a $1.5b valuation led by insider PayU, the fintech investment arm of Naspers.
Matt Oppenheimer, Remitly’s co-founder and CEO, said in an interview this week that customer growth has increased by 200% compared to a year ago, with 300 million customers served in aggregate spread evenly across the 17 send-from markets and the 57 send-to countries where Remitly operates. He attributes that to Remitly offering not just competitive rates, but its focus on doing it virtually — that is, without requiring people to come into physical shops to send or receive money, as they might more typically do with Western Union or MoneyGram.