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(which has been ramping up its startup investment as of late) led the round, which also included participation from and along with existing backer , which used its pro rata, according to Flywire.

The new financing takes Flywire鈥檚 since its 2011 inception to $263.2 million, according to 附近上门 data.

Flywire also announced it has acquired , a developer of payments software for the health care industry that had raised $36.4 million in venture capital funding.

In a phone conversation with Flywire CEO , I learned more about what the company does and how much it鈥檚 grown. He was refreshingly transparent.

So, let鈥檚 get into the details.

More than software

Fundamentally, Flywire is a payments company but it has also built software to help process payments. (Which makes it both a SaaS operator and a transactions platform.) Its focus is on the education, health care and travel industry verticals.

鈥淎ll three are fraught with a lack of digitization, and are inherently complex with legacy systems involved,鈥� Massaro told 附近上门 News. 鈥淲e think these areas have been underserved.鈥�

To date Flywire says it has processed over $12 billion in total payments volume for over 2,000 clients around the world. Seven of the eight Ivy League schools use it to collect cross-border payments, for example. As do hundreds of hospitals, including the top four hospital systems in the United States. People going on exotic trips such as African safaris can use it during their travel.

鈥淲e don鈥檛 just deliver the software that helps around payments,鈥� Massaro said. 鈥淲e actually move the money.鈥� In fact, it claims to 鈥渕ove billions of dollars across 200+ countries and 150 currencies.鈥�

Flywire has two revenue streams. It makes SaaS revenue off the software it鈥檚 using to help clients such as , or . But the majority of its revenue is transaction-based.

Speaking of which, Flywire is a unicorn with 鈥渨ell over $100 million in revenue,鈥� according to Massaro. Despite being around for nine years, it鈥檚 still seeing nearly 40 percent revenue growth year over year, he said.

It also has 530 employees, which is 10 times the 50 it had just five years ago.

Massaro expects Flywire to return to profitability this year, and said the company has been 鈥渧ery capital efficient.鈥�

鈥淧rior to this round, we had $45 miillion in cash on the balance sheet, and now we have about $75 million to $80 million,鈥� he told me. 鈥淎nd we don鈥檛 expect to burn a lot this year.鈥�

Acquisition

In acquiring Simplee, Flywire picked up a competitor, sort of. Flywire has historically focused on the provider side, helping digitize their back offices. Simplee is focused more on the patient experience.

鈥淲e both help providers engage their patients digitally,鈥� Massaro said. 鈥淭hey can help explain the cost of patients鈥� medical care, and how much they owe insurance, in addition to helping them digitize payments.鈥�

With the buy, Flywire also expanded its geographical footprint, as Simplee has offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv. In addition to its Boston headquarters, Flywire has 10 offices, including locations in Europe and Asia.

Last year, the company expanded into Latin America and plans to continue that expansion geographically. It also plans to double down on all its verticals.

Illustration:

At least that鈥檚 the stereotype you might have in mind if you had to guess the most common alumni affiliations of startup executives. And in truth, you鈥檇 be reasonably accurate.

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While of course there鈥檚 no degree required to be a venture-backed startup executive, in practice it sure helps to graduate from one of a shortlist of prestigious universities. That鈥檚 true for CEOs. It鈥檚 true for founders. And, as we recently put to the test, it鈥檚 also true for chief technology officers.

With another back-to-school season upon us, 附近上门 News decided to celebrate with a data dive into top universities among funded startup CTOs. For this dataset, we looked at U.S. schools attended by chief technology officers of companies that have raised $500,000 or more in funding in roughly the past two years.

For the most part, the results aren鈥檛 too different from lists we鈥檝e put together previously for founders and CEOs. But there is one large and very obvious difference: CTOs are much more likely to graduate from technical universities and other schools renowned for their engineering and computer science departments.

So what鈥檚 the top school for funded CTOs? We list the top twenty below:

Ok, so what stands out about the list above? For one, we should note that every time we do one of these lists for any education ranking related to funded startups, Stanford is the school that winds up on top.

One might expect to see Stanford鈥檚 dominance slip a bit as the center of gravity in startup-ville shifts North from the university鈥檚 Palo Alto hometown to San Francisco, the current capital of the unicorn boom. However, that doesn鈥檛 seem to be happening. VCs still love to fund Stanford grads, and Stanford grads are still happy to cash their checks.

Seeing MIT in the Number 2 slot is also noteworthy, if not surprising. While MIT reliably ranks in the Top 3 for our funded CEO and founder rankings that don鈥檛 include business schools, it鈥檚 higher for the CTO rankings. One might expect this for what many lists as the nation鈥檚 top technical school.

University of California at Berkeley also performs well in our CTO list. The school reliably ranks as one of the top five American universities for engineering and technology, and its proximity to San Francisco and Silicon Valley don鈥檛 hurt. In fact, a majority of Berkeley-affiliated CTOs in our list work at startups in the San Francisco Bay Area.

We also found that public universities appear to be graduating a higher relative proportion of funded CTOs than funded CEOs or founders (a group that may also include CTOs). Half of the top ten schools for funded CTOs are public universities.

Methodology

You see a lot numbers above. So just how definitive is this dataset, you may be asking? In truth, it鈥檚 more a general guide than a definitive count, given that a majority of 附近上门 CTO profiles do not list where the subject went to school.

For this dataset, we looked at chief technology officers of companies that raised $500,000 or more since August of 2017. There were nearly 5,500 附近上门 profiles that met that criteria, but of those, fewer than half had a college or university listed.

CTO alum also did not necessarily obtain a technical degree from the university listed. Our search parameters did not allow us to specify a major. Also, we include business, law and medical school grads in the CTO search, although these accounted for very few of the degree recipients.

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