Viva Republic, the company behind Korean financial services app Toss, has closed a $48 million Series C funding round which includes a strategic investment..
Viva Republic, the company behind Korean financial services app Toss , has closed a $48 million Series C funding round which includes a strategic investment from payment giant PayPal.
The deal is PayPal’s second investment this year — coming just days after it backed health startup Virta — but the round was led by San Mateo-based VC firm Goodwater Capital, which led Viva Republica’s Series B round and counts Korean tech giants Kakao (messaging) and Coupang (e-commerce) among its portfolio. Bessemer Venture Partners, Altos Ventures and Partech Ventures also participated in the round.
The deal takes Viva Republic to $76 million raised to date. The company didn’t provide a post-money valuation, but Goodwater Capital partner Eric Kim said there’s “a clear path to it becoming one of Asia’s most significant fintech unicorns.”
Viva Republica is known for Toss, a financial services platform that started out tackling Korea’s archaic payment system. The pain of cumbersome online payment processes is what drove former dentist SG Lee to start the business two years ago, and today Toss has processed more than USD $3 billion in transactions from a base of 6 million registered users.
“Before Toss, users required five passwords and around 37 clicks to transfer $10. With Toss users need just 1 password and three steps to transfer up to KRW 500,000 ($430),” Lee said in a statement.
Over the course of its founding, Toss has gone beyond peer-to-peer transfers and branched into consumer financing. Inspired by the likes of Kredit Karma and Mint.com in the U. S., it launched a financial dashboard, credit scoring and micro-loans (with one-minute decisions) in a bid to make financial services “as frictionless as possible” in Korea.
