Galileo Financial Technologies, a Mercato Partners Growth II (“Fund II”) portfolio company, closed a $77 million equity financing of Series B growth capital. The financing was led by Accel Partners, a brand name, late-stage growth investor. Ryan Smith, Founder and CEO of Qualtrics, participated in the round and will serve as a strategic growth advisor to Galileo, which will give the company additional credibility in the marketplace and serve to accelerate key business development initiatives.

The financing will provide growth capital for strategic growth objectives and partial liquidity for existing investors. As the only institutional investor in the company prior to this financing, Mercato Partners is extremely proud of this milestone and of the opportunity to continue working with the company and its new partners to build additional accretive returns to Fund II. The partnership, history, and evolution of this company are illustrative of the growth stage and validate Mercato’s approach to the work.

Fund II initially invested $8 million in April 2014 in a Series A round and invested an additional $1.1 million in accretive secondary transactions over the past five years. At the time of our Series A investment, Galileo was a founder-led, profitable, high-growth company.

Galileo consistently invested in its differentiated technology and bolstered its go-to-market efforts. Beginning with product innovation, Galileo opened its APIs to enable FinTech (short for Financial Technology) companies and developers to build efficiently on their platform. These technological innovations enabled rapid and robust business development efforts that diversified their client base with modern FinTech clients and drove organic growth with enhanced operating margins. Galileo developed an AI-driven Fraud Protection product using deep machine learning that reduces and remediates in real-time, payment fraud loss by 80% over the industry standard.

Galileo runs backend integrations with financial institutions for some of the biggest names in financial technology. Today, Galileo is the foundational technology that enables FinTech innovations marketed by marquis customers including Robinhood, Transferwise, Chime, Monzo, Varo, and Google. They are truly FinTech’s tech. In fact, Robinhood rolled out its innovative cash management program on October 8, 2019. Built on Galileo’s technology, it provides consumers far greater flexibility and improved options for managing their money.

Galileo also launched Money+, a fractional securities product that enables debit-like payment processing with the wealth accumulation of higher-yielding securities. Galileo announced the launch at the Excel conference, a white-labeled, FDIC-insured mobile banking program to individual investors through wealth management firms. Money+ is a scalable, sustainable banking solution that puts people before profits and offers market-based interest rates instead of the bare minimum rate of return on deposits.

Navigating the growth stage is never linear. The ability to retain a profitable core business, innovate at the edges, and assemble a finely tuned go-to-market engine enables only the most disciplined and well-instrumented companies to deliver high-value harvests. Galileo is one of these companies and Clay Wilkes is one of the truly visionary CEOs. We are extremely proud of Galileo and honored to share their accomplishment.