Boston-based Flywire, which helps universities, hospitals, and businesses accept payments made in foreign currencies, raises $100M Series D led by Temasek
Flywire CEO Mike Massaro has helped build a payments company that expects to reach $100 million in annualized revenue this year.
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2018 round is the opening move in an arc the related coverage completes: two years later Flywire raised a $120M Series E at a $1B+ valuation led by Goldman Sachs while acquiring healthcare-payments startup Simplee, then closed up more than 46% in its Nasdaq debut at over $3B. The through-line is a company scaling from university tuition collections into a multi-vertical cross-border platform.
Temasek's lead matters beyond the check size: the Singapore state investor was simultaneously tracking Southeast Asia's digital-economy funding ($7.7B in the year to June per the Google-Temasek-Bain report), making Flywire one of its bets on global payment flows rather than a regional play.
First-order effects
- Flywire gets $100M to scale a business already expecting $100M in annualized revenue across universities, hospitals, and businesses accepting foreign-currency payments.
- Temasek takes a lead position in a US cross-border payments company, extending its fintech footprint beyond Southeast Asia.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in cross-border infrastructure — Currencycloud raised an $80M Series E from Visa and BNP Paribas months earlier — face a well-funded competitor embedding itself in education and healthcare billing rather than selling generic APIs.
- The fresh capital sets up the M&A pattern the coverage confirms: Simplee in healthcare in 2020 and the $330M Sertifi acquisition for hotel events payments in 2025 both extend the same vertical-expansion playbook.
Third-order effects
- If sovereign wealth funds keep leading growth rounds in payments infrastructure, cross-border processing consolidates around vertically specialized platforms rather than horizontal rails — with state-backed capital shaping which players get there.
- Flywire's trajectory from Series D to public markets suggests education and healthcare receivables become contested territory between banks' correspondent networks and software-native entrants.
The trend: Cross-border payments are shifting from bank-correspondent plumbing to vertically specialized software platforms, increasingly financed by sovereign capital betting on global education, health, and travel flows.