Vend, an online point-of-sale (POS) software provider, recently received a $22 million investment round that included PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel from Valar Ventures and Craig Winkler, founder of MYOB. Both were also major shareholders in online accounting program Xero.
Barry Brott, a partner at Square Peg Capital (Australia) and Matt Roackman from Seek.com.au also invested to support plans to expand the New Zealand-born retail app’s reach to the US and Europe.
“Vend’s powerful software is poised to enable millions of small and medium-sized businesses to focus less on paperwork and more on bringing better products and services to their customers,” Thiel said in a press release.
Vend planned to grow its global market by investing in new partnerships, resellers, staff and customers. Vend said it would expand its Australian team from 10 to over 30 staff by next year.
“The additional funding will accelerate our North American plans, allowing us to grow our major market and extend into small and independent retail shops across the continent. The last few years have seen a resurgence of independent retailers who have become more competitive against big chain stores by adopting cloud based POS software,” said Vaughan Rowsell, CEO of Vend.
PayPal announced that Vend had signed up as a global POS partner in May 2012, allowing its retailers to accept PayPal in-store. The software provider raised just under $7.5 million in May 2013 and $2.8m between their first two capital rounds in 2011 and 2012.