BNPL QuickaPay sells to legal payments venture RapidPay in Antler’s first exit

Sydney BNPL fintech QuickaPay has been acquired by legal services payments platform RapidPay.

QuickaPay was co-founded by Nathan Carroll and Nick Glynn in 2019 and was one of the first companies to emerge out of the early-stage VC and startup accelerator Antler Australia.

Antler invested pre-seed funding in QuickaPay and it’s the VC’s first exit among more than 50 startups it’s nurtured and backed since also launching in Sydney in 2019.

The startup’s other backers include Black Nova, Thorn Business Finance and Lederer group.

RapidPay offers online payment solutions for legal practitioners and is owned by LEAP-InfoTrack Group. It operates in Australia, the US and the UK and plans to use QuickaPay to offer a dedicated payment and BNPL service for Australian law firms.

Co-founder Nick Glynn said QuickaPay set out to solve the problem of poor cash flow for small businesses in both B2B and B2C. Its prototype product was a simple invoice upload and payment service, which resulted in 10 clients signing on during the launch week. 

“It was then we realised the potential for Quicka to grow into an all-in-one payment and finance platform and rapidly launched Payment Links, which now outnumbers our invoice based payments by almost 20:1,” Glynn said. 

QuickaPay evolved into integrations and API payments before entering the legal space and encountering RapidPay. 

The two companies will merge their teams and technology. Glynn said the collaboration will enable law firms using RapidPay to get paid faster by offering BNPL to their clients, in addition to RapidPay’s existing market-leading capabilities in legal payments. 

“Today, we are bringing together our financing platform with RapidPay and our ambition of what we can achieve together to create a global player providing payments and finance to Legal firms home and abroad,” he said. 

“As part of this acquisition, we’ll be closing the doors of QuickaPay to new merchants and continue to support our current merchants and customers until March 2022 before merging with the new RapidPay platform. We’d both like to thank those who accompanied us on this journey.” 

Antler APAC managing partner Bede Moore said he was impressed by the speed the QuickaPay team demonstrated in growing, scaling the business ahead of the exit. 

“In two short years, this team has been able to attract 700 merchants and over 6,200 customers to its platform, which is no small feat considering the majority of that time was spent in lockdown due to the Coronavirus pandemic. They built a robust business and a strong team, all of whom will follow them into the RapidPay acquisition,” he said.

“As one of the first teams built with and invested in by Antler, and the first to be acquired, it’s a special moment for the Antler Australia team and Fund. We’re so proud to have supported QuickaPay from the start. Its journey and evolution is evidence of the success of the Antler model.”