(Bloomberg) — Payment app provider Sunday raised $100 million to drive a push in North America, only a few months after its creation and seed funding round.
Coatue Management led the financing round, with partners from DST Global also participating, the company said in a statement Wednesday. Sunday, which allows restaurant diners to pay via smartphone by scanning a QR code, raised $24 million in April from investors including Coatue and New Wave, a seed investment vehicle co-founded by French entrepreneur Xavier Niel.
The cash will allow the company to expand in Canada and the U.S., as well as hire developers to create new features such as table booking and ordering. The company, which has 170 employees and 1,500 clients, aims to have 300 staff and 15,000 clients by the end of next year.
Mobile payment is booming in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic as merchants and customers seek way to avoid contact when paying. In France, one of Sunday’s core markets, the total value of mobile payments rose 179% to 2.7 billion euros in 2020, according to the Banque de France.
“Eighteen months ago, no one was using QR codes,” said co-founder Christine de Wendel, who previously was chief operating officer at Eurazeo SE-backed ManoMano as well as Zalando SE’s country manager for France. “There’s really been a revolution in the way people want to pay.”
Based in Atlanta, Sunday was created as an internal solution for the Paris-based restaurant-chain Big Mamma, and was spun off as a separate entity in March. Its app is used in France, the U.K., Spain, Canada and the U.S. Among the restaurants that use the product are Paris-based one-Michelin-star restaurant Jacques Faussat, as well as New York-based Happy Cooking, which operates Joseph Leonard and Fairfax in the West Village.
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