In an extended post at the Zooz blog, company CEO Oren Levy announced that the eight-year old global payments platform he co-founded had agreed to be acquired by PayU. Financial terms were not disclosed, but Reuters reported that the deal was valued between $80 million and $100 million.
“Although it wasn’t entirely out of the blue, I can honestly say that PayU is a natural buyer for Zooz,” Levy wrote. “It simply makes sense.” He explained that given the options of continuing to raise capital and remain independent or seek the opportunity to grow “under the umbrella of PayU. The choice was clear.”
PayU will use Zooz’s technology to provide more payment options for its merchants, and help the company expand into cross border payments markets in developing, high-growth areas. This includes building a payment infrastructure with fraud management and smart routing. With a strong presence in India, Netherlands-based PayU currently has operations in 17 markets around the world.
The acquisition of Zooz also represents a win for the company’s open platform approach that gives merchants the ability to connect with a variety of payment providers. “In the choice between building a closed walled garden and an open platform, we decided to go with the second model,” PayU CEO Laurent le Moal told The Indian Wire. “The reality is that you need to be neutral and work with everyone.”
Levy and Zooz CTO Ronen Morecki will join PayU’s leadership team. The company’s 70 employees will also become a part of PayU.
“While Zooz will continue to innovate and further disrupt the payments world,” Levy wrote,” the scale that will be introduced through the sheer number of merchants using the PayU payment solution, coupled with the huge trove of data that can accelerate our analytics and machine learning capabilities, make this an exciting opportunity that we’re eager to explore.”
Zooz demonstrated its Transforming Checkout solution at FinovateFall 2013. Based in Raanana, Israel, Zooz announced a partnership with PayU last year that combined its cross border payment expertise with PayU’s presence in emerging markets. This spring, the company launched its open-payments-platform-as-a-service solution, PaymentsOS.