PayU acquires Zooz to Take on International Payment Services

As per recent headlines, PayPal led a $50 million round in the cross border payment specialist PPRO. PPRO is a competitor who announced an acquisition in a similar space. PayU which is also described as the PayPal of the developing world has acquired Zooz.

Zooz is an Israel based start-up that provides an API to merchants to let them accept a variety of payments depending on the type of market. PayPal and PayU have been working together to provide different payment options to merchants in markets where PayU is efficiently active. The future plan involves integration of services to further enable PayU to become an integral part of cross border payments.

PayU’s CEO, Laurent le Moal, in an interview said -
“In the choice between building a closed walled garden and open platform, we decided to go with the second model. The reality is that you need to be neutral and work with everyone.”

PayU will use it's funds to add features like fraud management, real-time reporting and smart routing to the Zooz platform. The CEO of Zooz is Oren Levy and the CTO is Ronen Morecki who are also the co-founders. The co-founders will take up respective senior roles at PayU with a team of 70 members of Zooz for business development with larger merchants.

Zooz was founded 7 years back, in 2010. It had raised almost $33 million from investors like Target Global Ventures, Fang Fund, iAngels, Kreos Capital and existing investors Blumberg Capital, lool ventures, Rhodium, Claltech, XSeed Capital, CampOne Ventures and angel investor Eilon Tirosh.

The exact terms and conditions of the deal have not been disclosed yet, however, PayU confirmed that this deal spends a total of $350 million on acquisitions and investments to date. A break up of this could be shown as: $130 million for acquiring CitrusPay, investing $120-$130 million in Kreditech.

Zooz’s service addresses the widespread fragmentation that exists in payments globally, which is similar to PPRO, the company in which PayPal invested in earlier. This can be a problem for a merchant that is based in one country but interested in selling to people in another.

Read more at techcrunch.com