GoDaddy acquires Poynt for $365 mn, empowers small businesses to sell everywhere

By Pavithra R

GoDaddy, focussed on empowering everyday entrepreneurs has announced that the company has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Poynt, an all-in-one payment platform offering various benefits to businesses, with its contactless, fast, secure, and safe payment processing solution.

Founded in 2013 with the mission of fixing a broken commerce ecosystem, Poynt is a revolutionary open commerce platform empowering merchants with software and services to transform their business. The firm reimagined the ubiquitous payment terminal into a connected, multi-purpose device that runs third-party apps.

Poynt offers a complete suite of products needed for small businesses to sell and accept payments anywhere, spanning point-of-sale (POS) systems, payments, invoicing, loyalty and rewards programs, and transaction management. It also offers a range of payment processing models for small businesses, including integration with 16 different payment processors, featuring the top five U.S. banks, and offers Poynt Payments in the U.S. built in partnership with Elavon/U.S. Bank. The FinTech is backed by Matrix Partners, Oak HC/FT Partners, Stanford-StartX Fund, Webb Investment Network, Nyca Partners, Google Ventures and other individual investors. Its service is being used by more than 100,000 merchants with over $16 bn in annual Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV). 

Under the terms of the deal, GoDaddy will pay $320 mn in cash at closing and $45 mn in deferred cash payments subject to performance and employment conditions over three years. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2021, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions.

“Poynt has spent the past seven years building the most advanced connected commerce platform on the market. Our team is super excited to join forces and help millions of GoDaddy entrepreneurs sell everywhere, in the most seamless experience possible, at a time they couldn’t need it more,” said Poynt CEO Osama Bedier.

Upon closing of the transaction, Poynt CEO Osama Bedier will join the GoDaddy leadership team and will report directly to GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani and lead a new Commerce Division dedicated to creating intuitive and seamless commerce experiences for small businesses.

Through the deal, GoDaddy is planning to integrate Poynt with its Websites + Marketing and WordPress commerce services to enable small businesses to boost sales and customer satisfaction by seamlessly bridging both online and offline shopping experiences.

“Commerce is critical to our customers, and we continue to invest in building seamlessly intuitive experiences that enable small businesses to sell everywhere. Poynt accelerates our strategy to provide a complete suite of commerce and payment services to address this critical customer need and focus on a large addressable market opportunity. We’ve built leading e-commerce capabilities that today allow small businesses to easily sell on their sites, across major marketplaces and the most popular social networks, and now we will help make them successful everywhere,” said GoDaddy CEO Aman Bhutani.