Payments processor Adyen says it doubled revenues to $350M in 2015, now handling $50B in transactions

Dutch payments company Adyen has reported a bumper year in 2015, as the fintech unicorn said it more than doubled its revenues last year to $350 million.

Moreover, the Amsterdam-headquartered startup claims it processed a whopping $50 billion in transactions in the 12 months to December, up from $25 billion the previous year. Adyen says it has been profitable since 2011 and that 40 percent of its revenues come from the U.S.

Founded in 2006, Adyen is one of a number of global technology companies that let merchants accept most kinds of payments in-store, online, and on mobile, and it claims a number of high-profile clients, including Netflix, Dropbox, Spotify, Uber, Crocs, and Evernote. Fellow European startup Worldpay, which operates in the same sphere, IPO’d last October in what was one of Britain’s biggest public offerings in more than two years.

As for Adyen, it raised an undisclosed amount of money last year in addition to the $265 million it had already raised, and claimed its valuation had grown to more than $2 billion. So will Adyen be following Worldpay’s lead and going public in the near future?

“We are 100 percent focused on maximizing our growth and doing everything we can to help our merchants in the best possible way,” explained Adyen CEO Pieter van der Does, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Spending time on an IPO does not help us achieve this right now.”

Van der Does said the company is focusing on growing its point-of-sale and omnichannel business across the US, Europe, and Australia, while continuing to push its ecommerce business globally.

Other notable milestones of the past 12 months include Adyen nabbing some major airlines as customers, as well as expanding its in-store point-of-sale systems across Europe and in the U.S. This represents part of its so-called “omnichannel” approach, whereby it can cater to transactions regardless of whether they’re online or in physical stores, and this is what it will continue to pitch to merchants, moving forward.

“In a world where commerce is global and shoppers expect the same experience across all touchpoints and geographies, Adyen’s ability to process transactions both online and in the physical world on one platform places the company in a completely unique position,” said van der Does. “Unlike other players, we have built a completely new platform in-house from the ground up, with no patching or combining of legacy platforms. This makes Adyen the only payments technology available that connects ecommerce, mobile, and point-of-sale payments, and supports all key payment methods globally.”

Adyen is one of a number of fintech startups building a solid reputation from their headquarters in Europe. Backed by big names such as Richard Branson and Peter Thiel, London-based TransferWise has been knocking cracks into the lucrative currency exchange market with its peer-to-peer alternative that sidesteps bank fees. Then there’s mobile banking startups, such as Number26, also backed by Peter Thiel, that are looking to disrupt the consumer banking market.

There’s definitely something in the air in Europe right now that makes fintech a good place to be. “During the past decades, innovation has been lacking in the financial services industry across Europe, due to a lack of transparency and little uptake of what new technologies can bring to efficiency,” Van der Does noted.

“There is now a variety of technology players that are successfully addressing this across Europe. One thing that is unique in Europe is that we have so many different countries and cultures to deal with from day one, which means global expansion is right in the heart of many of the fintech startups here,” he added.