附近上门

Payments platform plans to buy , an Australian buy now, pay later service, in an all-stock deal valued at around $29 billion.

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Melbourne-based Afterpay is publicly traded on Australia鈥檚 ASX exchange. It currently counts more than 16 million consumers and nearly 100,000 merchants globally as users of its platform, including major retailers across fashion, homewares, beauty, sporting goods and other categories. The company, backed by investors including and , has raised just under $449 million in funding, per 附近上门 data.

Afterpay competes in the increasingly crowded buy now, pay later space, which allows consumers to break up online purchases into smaller payments. Its biggest competitors include Stockholm-based , which has raised $3.7 billion from private investors to date, and , which raised $1.5 billion in venture funding before going public in January. Affirm鈥檚 share price has since plummeted to less than half of its 52-week high in February, but jumped 14 percent in morning trading on Monday after the Afterpay acquisition was announced.

Another major player in the BNPL space includes fintech giant , which in 2008 purchased Bill Me Later, an early pioneer in the space.

All told, venture investors poured $1.7 billion into buy now, pay later companies between 2016 and 2020, per 附近上门 data. A late last year predicted the BNPL market was poised to 鈥済row 10-15 times by 2025 to eventually process between $650 billion and $1 trillion in transactions.鈥�

Venture investors like the BNPL business model because these startups essentially have two revenue streams, , a venture partner at , which invested in e-commerce pay-over-time financing tool , told 附近上门 News earlier this year.

The first revenue source is the actual transaction, when the merchant typically pays between 2 and 3 percent of the purchase price to the BNPL service in exchange for being able to offer that convenience to its customers. The second revenue stream for the BNPL service is interest payments from borrowers.

Square鈥檚 shares have surged 105 percent over the past year amid such as its mobile Cash App. It also reported second-quarter earnings on Sunday, revealing that revenue had more than doubled from the same quarter the previous year, to $4.7 billion.

San Francisco-based Square said it plans to integrate Afterpay into its Cash App and seller ecosystem.

鈥淏y combining with Square, we will further accelerate our growth in the U.S. and globally, offer access to a new category of in-person merchants, and provide a broader platform of new and valuable capabilities and services to our merchants and consumers, Afterpay co-founders and co-CEOs and said in a statement announcing the deal.

Illustration: .