Flywire acquires healthtech startup Simplee, fueled by $120M Series E investment from Goldman Sachs

Flywire, a Boston, MA-based vertical payments startup has acquired health technology Simplee to optimize the digital payments and patient engagement experience in healthcare and scale its global payments services. The acquisition was fueled by recent $120 million Series E investment round led by Goldman Sachs. Flywire said the deal will help the 9-year old startup to accelerates its multi-vertical strategy, broadens healthcare client base, and capture increased share of the trillion-dollar global payments TAM.

Founded in 2011 by Iker Marcaide, Flywire is a late stage vertical payments startup company used by over 2,000 organizations around the world to deliver on their customers’ most important moments. The startup has vertical-specific insight and technology that allows organizations to optimize the payment experience for their customers while eliminating operational challenges—from invoicing to payment reconciliation. 24×7 multilingual support via phone, email, and chat, and online tracking, ensures that both the client and customer have complete control over their payments.

To date Flywire has processed over $12 billion in total payments volume for over 2,000 clients around the world. The company is headquartered in Boston and has offices in Chicago, London and Manchester (UK), Valencia (Spain), Shanghai, Singapore, Tokyo, Cluj (Romania), and Sydney. Flywire has raised over $140M in venture funding and counts Temasek, Bain Capital Ventures, Spark Capital and F-Prime among its investors.

Simplee was founded Roberto Rabinovich, Tom Tsarfati, and Tomer Shoval just a year before Flywire. Simplee specializes in developing payment software intended for the health care industry. Before the acquisition, Simplee had raised $36.4 million in venture capital funding. The startup founded the patient financial care movement. It provides a leading technology platform for engaging patients and addressing affordability with personalized paths to payment. Simplee’s platform, Peer Reviewed by HFMA, leverages information from billions of patient interactions and proprietary healthcare tuned algorithms to drive a recommendation engine for patient payments and engagement.

The acquisition builds on Flywire’s growing healthcare payments business and accelerates the company’s market share. Flywire is also announcing a $120 million Series E investment round, led by Goldman Sachs, which contributes to Flywire’s strong balance sheet and provides additional capital to support the company’s vision to digitize payments across its key verticals, including education, healthcare and travel.

Bolstered by new digital capabilities, global payments revenue is expected to grow at a 5.9% CAGR from 2019-2028 to become a $2.5 trillion industry by 2028, according to Boston Consulting Group. However, the payments experience across many industries, like healthcare, is fraught with inefficiencies and poorly integrated point solutions, which accelerate financial losses. Exacerbating high healthcare costs is the secular trend towards high-deductible health plans; according to CMS, healthcare patients in the United States will be responsible for $365.5 BN in out-of-pocket healthcare spend per year, representing a market opportunity for Flywire that is about 70% of the size of the entire U.S. e-commerce spend.

Flywire’s acquisition of Simplee accelerates the digitization of payments to address the challenges around patient engagement as well as healthcare finance and affordability. Combining Flywire’s high-tech platform for providers with Simplee’s consumer-first paths to payment, both patients and providers are empowered to settle payment faster and on their own terms. Together, the companies will power four of the top ten US healthcare systems and process more than $10 billion in patient payments per year.

“Flywire is uniquely built on a global payments network, which is the cornerstone of how we move billions of dollars across 200+ countries and 150 currencies, and an industry-leading payments platform,” said Mike Massaro, CEO of Flywire. “This digital foundation enables us to develop vertical-specific applications that make payments more efficient and cost-effective for our global clients. The Simplee acquisition improves patient engagement and healthcare affordability and extends these capabilities to a broader customer base.”

Flywire is also announcing a $120 million Series E investment round led by Goldman Sachs, which will support Flywire’s ongoing investment in its multi-vertical strategy. This latest round brings the company’s total capital investment to $260 million. Tiger Management and Adage Capital Management also joined the round as new investors with participation from existing investors.

“We are thrilled to lead the Series E round for Flywire,” said Ashwin Gupta, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs’ Merchant Banking Division. “They bring together a unique blend of a payments network, platform and vertical-specific solutions to completely digitize the payments experience for their clients across industries. We look forward to continuing to help accelerate Flywire’s growth.”