Paddle

Paddle is a British company that offers a payment infrastructure platform for SaaS platforms to manage payment routing, invoicing, and subscription management and renewal. The platform also provides fraud prevention, compliance, tax collection, as well as analytics and retention solutions to its users. Paddle follows a pay-per-use model and charges customers 5% of the transaction value and USD 0.50 per transaction.

The company was also developing an in-app purchasing (IAP) system for iOS developers, as an alternative to Apple. It was to be launched by the end of 2022. It reportedly planned to charge users 10% for transactions under USD 10 and 5% on larger transactions, lower than Apple’s 30% charge. As of May 2022, the solution had over 2,000 developers signed up, which Paddle claimed represented around USD 2 billion in app store volume.

Key customers and partnerships

The company has offices in the UK and the US and offers its software to over 4,000 software companies (including AI companies like Vidyo.ai and Kaleido AI) across more than 200 territories globally, as of July 2023. Paddle also expanded its platform capabilities in May 2022 by adding analytics and retention tools, by acquiring ProfitWell for more than USD 200 million .

Funding and financials

Paddle’s annual revenue reportedly grew at an average of 175% YoY over the four years leading to May 2022. The company raised USD 200 million in Series D funding and debt financing in the same month, led by KKR, at a valuation of USD 1.4 billion. It intended to invest the funds to grow its platform and meet the market demand. However, the company subsequently laid off around 8% of its employees in January 2023, citing the ongoing market downturn and rising inflation following the Covid-19 pandemic-led growth in market demand.