SALT LAKE CITY — Utah’s Galileo has been quietly building its presence as a basis for digital payment and transaction processing and on Thursday announced a $77 million Series A funding round led by the Bay Area’s Accel Partners with participation from Qualtrics co-founder and CEO Ryan Smith.
Much like the customer-experience company Smith co-founded, Galileo has opted to self-finance for years and, also like Qualtrics, is having its first institutional funding round led by Accel, a giant among U.S. venture firms based in Palo Alto, California.
Unlike many tech endeavors taking on initial venture investment, Galileo is profitable and, as of September of this year, logged 130% year-over-year growth on the way to managing some $26 billion in annual payment volume.
Galileo founder and CEO Clay Wilkes said one of the keys to the company’s ongoing success has been the ability to delight clients.
“Over the years, we’ve built the (application program interface) standard for card issuing programs and fintech innovation, focusing on a feature-rich product set, profitability and delighting our clients,” Wilkes said in a statement. “This funding will help us double-down on these themes, while also becoming more aggressive in expanding geographically and providing the building blocks for the world’s most innovative payments programs.
“We’re thrilled to be working with Accel and Ryan Smith.”
Application program interfaces are the digital connections that allow one software program to connect and communicate with another software program. One common analogy for such program interfaces is to think of them as restaurant waiters that act as liaisons between the diners and the kitchen, shuttling orders and meals between the two parties.
Wilkes describes Galileo as a digital platform that “allows our clients to create accounts and receive payments” though he notes there’s a lot more to it than that.
The company was founded in 2000 during the very early days of ecommerce and not long after the ability to make and receive payments via the digital ether became a thing, helped along by the launch of PayPal in 1999.
Wilkes said the plan from the beginning was to rethink, and rebuild, the world of digital financial transactions.
“Galileo is a technology stack that many companies use to really do anything in the changing landscape of banking and payments,” Wilkes said.
While digital payments and money transactions were still very much a nascent concept when Galileo launched, the current state of the industry is one of vibrance and astounding growth. Wilkes said there are currently over 12,000 financial technology, or fintech, companies in the world and “Galileo serves many of them as clients.” HIs company helps those clients open and verify new financial accounts, issue and process payment cards and launch new products. He noted Galileo is the platform on which the No. 1 fintech companies in the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada and Mexico all conduct business.
As the digital financial world continues to evolve, with mobile transaction capabilities among the fastest-moving segments of the market, Galileo appears well-positioned for continued growth and pursuing its mission to, as Wilkes said, “continue to break down the way banking has been done for the last 300 years and re-optimize it for a changing world.”
Accel partner John Locke, who is joining the Galileo board of directors as part of the investment, said Galileo is the company providing the transactional infrastructure that is “powering the industry’s most innovative products.”
“We’re in a golden era of fintech innovation and Galileo has quietly built the API infrastructure layer powering the industry’s most innovative products,” Locke said in a statement. “Clay and his team have built a very impressive business with many parallels to companies like Qualtrics and Atlassian: bootstrapping first to build a quiet, profitable powerhouse and now, ready to go big globally.
“We’re excited to help Clay and team take Galileo to the next level.”
That next level will be accelerated by the new cash infusion which the company said will help fuel product development and expanded sales efforts, including further expansion into Latin America, the UK and Europe.
Galileo employs about 250 staff members and is headquartered in Salt Lake City with offices in San Francisco and New York City.