Sweden-based Trustly, which lets merchants accept payments via bank transfers, raises funding from investors led by BlackRock, sources say at a $1B+ valuation
Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch : Thanks: @ingridlunden
Context & Ripple Effects
Trustly's BlackRock-led round puts it over the $1B mark on bank-transfer rails rather than cards, joining a Swedish payments cohort already in motion: iZettle had planned a Nasdaq Stockholm IPO at roughly $1.1B in 2018, and Klarna had raised around $250M at a $2.5B valuation from Permira three years earlier.
The investor identity is the signal: BlackRock taking direct equity in payment processing foreshadows its later role in the Open USD stablecoin consortium alongside Visa, Mastercard and Stripe. For Trustly, this private round set up a path it ultimately did not take to market — the company later acquired recurring-payments startup SlimPay after shelving its IPO plans.
First-order effects
- Trustly enters the unicorn club with BlackRock as anchor investor, giving merchants accepting account-to-account payments a newly capitalized provider while validating bank-transfer rails as venture-scale infrastructure.
- BlackRock gains direct exposure to a payments processor, a step beyond its traditional fund-level positions in financial firms.
Second-order effects
- Klarna's steep climb — a $1B raise at $31B within a year of Trustly's round, with talk of $40B+ soon after — resets the comparable-set, making Trustly's $1B+ look like early innings and pressure-testing later Nordic fintech rounds upward.
- Checkout rivals built on card economics face a competitor whose funding lets it undercut interchange-heavy pricing with cheaper bank-transfer settlement.
Third-order effects
- Asset managers are becoming direct owners of payment infrastructure — BlackRock here leads a unicorn round and later co-launches a reserve-yield stablecoin — blurring the line between passive capital and payments operators.
- Sweden's fintech cluster is consolidating around divergent exits: iZettle toward an IPO, Trustly toward shelving its listing and buying SlimPay instead, suggesting private ownership plus bolt-on M&A is becoming the default endgame for mid-tier payment unicorns.
The trend: Institutional capital led by asset managers is funding non-card payment rails across the Nordics, building unicorns that stay private longer and consolidate through acquisition rather than IPO.