OnBuy’s Cas Paton Teases Major Announcement This Week

British marketplace OnBuy has been on fire and a few weeks ago was just named one of the 25 fastest growing companies in Europe.

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Founder and CEO of OnBuy Cas Paton has been using LinkedIn to tease his followers about big announcements and the exciting roadmap the company laid out for 2023.

Yesterday, he revealed that OnBuy will launch its new payment service and the company will go live with Nuvei and Klarna, in addition to existing payments partner PayPal.

“… this project of moving OnBuy to ‘Merchant of Record’ (MoR) has been an all-consuming, hellish project, which has seen us park most other work, stagnate the business, and essentially completely rebuild the platform and the way we do payments, not only with customers, but with sellers as well,” said Paton.

He admits on LinkedIn, that this project has been a struggle internally as all teams were focused on this project that will enable OnBuy to scale further.

One of Paton’s main ambitions has been to scale OnBuy beyond the UK, but that requires a tech stack that can scale everywhere.

Nuvei is a payments solution provider with headquarters in Montreal, Canada, that will enable OnBuy to scale customer and seller payment solutions globally. And Klarna will bring a leading Buy Now Pay Later payments option for buyers to the marketplace platform.

“It’s the start of the most exciting era at OnBuy and it’s going to allow us to immediately move onto many new and exciting things,” he added.

“Once this goes out, THIS WEEK, we’re going to start a burst of activity on OnBuy – and we’re going to be inescapable; our noise in 2023 is about to turn up several notches.

“Our business is about to get very interesting, more than it is already! Our team have worked flat out to near exhaustion to get us to this point, and now we’re going to drive forward with all of our plans – this is what they call the fruits of labour, where everything comes together.”

OnBuy on Path to Profitability

In a second LinkedIn post, Paton added that they are working to replace a £15 million ($18.4m) debt facility by raising an additional £4 million ($4.9m) to fuel the planned growth.

The current market conditions are not favorable for taking on debt and by raising additional funds, the company will be able to become profitable sooner.

“OnBuy, the business, is working. We can see a clear path to saying ‘goodbye’ to our last negative EBITDA!,” exclaimed Paton. “Very pleased about this position. More to do, but first time we’ve been able to say that!! Soon!”

According to Crunchbase, OnBuy last took funding in 2021, raising a total of £44.3 million ($54.5m) over five funding rounds.

Even with the additional £4 million, it will still keep OnBuy’s overall funding very modest in comparison to other recent marketplace startups such as StockX ($690m), Whatnot ($484m), and Alt ($306m).