Aussie-founded fintech Fast raises $131 million, as founder Domm Holland eyes up a future beyond payments

Aussie-founded one-click checkout startup Fast has raised a massive US$102 million ($131 million) in Series B funding, as co-founder and chief Domm Holland sets his sights on growth beyond being a mere payments solution.

The latest funding round was led by fellow payments fintech Stripe and venture capital firm Addition Capital.

Existing investors Index Ventures, Susa Ventures, Sugar Capital and Jaren Glover also contributed to the raise.

Founded in Silicon Valley in March 2019, Fast is headed up by Aussie Domm Holland and American co-founder Allison Barr-Allen.

The fintech allows e-commerce businesses to offer Amazon-style one-click checkout to their customers.

From just two people at the beginning of 2020, the business has grown to a headcount of 90 today.

This funding follows a $US20 million ($30 million) Series A round in March last year, and the launch of Fast’s flagship Checkout product in September.

Now, it counts the likes of Aussie e-commerce giant Bigcommerce and WordPress sales plugin WooCommerce as customers.

Launched during the COVID-19 pandemic, Fast is playing in two sectors that are booming: fintech and e-commerce.

Holland tells SmartCompany a fresh booster of funding will allow the business to continue to ride that wave.

“The past year has made it clear that e-commerce will only continue to grow, at an even fast rate than previously expected,” he says.

The plan is to use this funding to “aggressively go after every major online seller in Australia, the US and the planet”, the founder explains.

He wants to see Fast becoming a pervasive force in the e-commerce sector, with consumers “haranguing” their favourite e-commerce stores if they’re not using it.

But, he also sees the business as more than a payments solution. In a video posted to Twitter, calling on people to apply for roles at the company, Holland said the team is looking for people not only to build a fast payment solution, but to help “solve core, fundamental identity problems”.

Online payments friction is really just identity friction, he explains. The pipe dream is to provide an end-to-end solution for this in all kinds of contexts, including things like medical records, travel and “every place online and offline where people, governments and businesses need to verify identity”.

To that end, the next 12 months will see further investment into the product, and into the development of new use cases.

By the end of 2021, Holland expects to have more than doubled headcount again, growing the company to 200 people — that includes building out the Australian team.

Fast takes something of an unorthodox approach to finding talent. Holland himself is a prolific Tweeter, so it’s perhaps only natural that the businesses uses Twitter as a route to source talent.

if you work in tech / engineering you need to watch this ?

if you dont, you need to retweet this ? pic.twitter.com/qjis5hY7iU

— domm (@domm) January 26, 2021

“Twitter is an unpaid member of our recruiting team. And it’s incredibly effective,” the founder says.

“Dozens of our current employees learned about Fast from Twitter and joined because of the platform’s ability to let you directly reach out to CEOs like me,” he explains.

While in the past Holland has set out to recruit the best and brightest people Silicon Valley has to offer, this is a fully remote company, and it stands to reason its seeking talent from the rest of the world too.

“Being able to reach a wider audience on social media platforms such as Twitter has been a great way for us to attract top talent beyond Silicon Valley.”