Squire Patton Boggs has advised US technology-driven payments company, Sezzle Inc., on its A$86 million capital raise.
The firm previously acted for Sezzle on its A$217 million ASX listing and IPO – one of the largest and most successful debuts on the ASX in 2019. That transaction received an Excellence Award in the 2019 ECM Deal of the Year category at the recent Australasian Lawyer awards.
The capital raising was structured by way of a $79 million institutional placement and an A$7 million retail securities purchase plan offer.
Sezzle provides a payments platform that facilitates fast, secure payments between shoppers and retailers, via a short-term, interest-free instalment payment plan that delivers to shoppers both a budgeting and financing value proposition. Sezzle has shown significant momentum since launching its payments platform in August 2017 and now has over 5,000 retail merchants, based primarily in the US and Canada, using the Sezzle platform.
Squire Patton Boggs corporate partner, Simon Rear, led the transaction and was assisted by associate, Michael Van Der Ende.
Simon Rear noted that the transaction reflected an emerging trend: “At the time of its listing, Sezzle had no operations in Australia, or any intention to commence such operations. We are seeing more and more young international technology companies seeking to list in Australia in order to scale their business and to provide liquidity at an earlier stage than would otherwise be possible on Nasdaq or similar markets. The ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ space is in significant growth mode right now and we look forward to seeing Sezzle go from strength to strength globally. There is a lot of capital looking to be deployed and we expect to see a lot of activity in areas that are unaffected by COVID-19, such as this sector, really advance.”