Buried midway through a press release sent out by European mobile payments company SumUp detailing its new $13 million-plus fundraising round is the news that two of the company's founders will be leaving.
Since its launch in 2011, SumUp has been known for its card reader software, with the company claiming that hundreds of thousands of merchants use its service to process credit card payments. Along with Sweden's iZettle and the German company Payleven, SumUp is one of Square's main competitors in Europe.
Russian financial tech fund Life.Sreda is reported to have led the Series C round, with existing investors Groupon, BBVA Ventures and other VC firms also contributing. Although no exact number has been announced for SumUp's latest round of fundraising, the Berlin-based startup has disclosed that the figure is a "double digit million dollar" amount, i.e. more than $10 million. The company has taken a total of $33 million in all, according to Crunchbase.
But along with the news that the company has raised a new round of funding, SumUp also announced that chief product officer Stefan Jeschonnek and chief commercial officer Jan Deepen, two of the company's four co-founders, will be leaving. This news follows the closure of the company's Dublin office in May, where SumUp previously employed 30 staff. Neither the company's remaining founders or the departed executives could be reached before publication. We'll update this story if we hear from them.
This isn't the first time that SumUp has seen the departure of a high profile executive. The company's COO and co-founder Petter Made left the company in December 2013 after leading SumUp's office in Ireland.
Founder and CEO Daniel Klein, and co-founder Marc-Alexander Christ remain at the company.
According to tech.eu, departed founder Jan Deepen played a crucial role in the company's expansion across Europe and Russia, which has made it one of Europe's leading names in the mobile payment industry.
Mobile payments has become an intensely competitive field, with Amazon recently launching its own service to compete with the likes of PayPal and Square, both of which already offer well-established credit card readers. Fortune reports that the global mobile payment volume is expected to reach $235.4 billion in 2013, up from $163.1 billion in 2012.