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That’s the business London-based is in. Its international money transfer and cashless remittance services facilitates payments from 50 “sending” countries to 150 “receiving” countries around the world.

Today, the company it financing from a troika of prior investors—, , and —which now values the company at $900 million, post-money.

According to Crunchbase data, the company has raised . The company’s last round, $40 million in Series C funding, , post-money, back in December 2017.

WorldRemit’s CEO, , said in that “For more than eight years our core purpose has been and continues to be to help migrants send money to their families, friends and communities. Our customers play a key role in the economies where they work and their remittances are important to their home countries.” Corcoran joined the company in October 2018 to take over the CEO role from cofounder , who co-founded the company with back in 2010. A indicates that Ahmed and Wines still serve director roles at the company.

“Over the past eight years, Ismail and his founding team have built a fantastic business that offers customers a compelling solution and value proposition,” TCV general partner said in a statement. He continued, “Since passing the reins to Breon and the new management team last year, the business has continued to build on this platform and accelerated. We believe the opportunity and proposition is larger than ever.”

The company is growing, but perhaps a bit slower than its executives and VC backers would like. When the company it said in a statement that the capital it raised would help WorldRemit reach 10 million customers “connected to emerging markets” by 2020. Today’s , some 18 months after the last round, said the company now “serves almost 4 million customers.” 2020 is six months away.

WorldRemit said it will use the fresh Series D capital to “further drive global growth and diversify the company’s product offering for both money transfer senders and recipients.” The company also said it will launch “a new money transfer solution targeting small and medium-sized business owners who trade internationally, especially in emerging markets.”

Against incumbents like Western Union and upstart peers like TransferWise, WorldRemit is competing for its piece of a growing pie. According to an , 2018 set records for international remittance flows. “Global remittances, which include flows to high-income countries, reached $689 billion in 2018, up from $633 billion in 2017,” according to the report.

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It’s a wild year. Financings of a quarter-billion dollars or more abound, stumbled while going public, and and did not, the markets are hot, crypto is trending up, and Slack is racing towards a direct listing. It’s a lot of fun to watch, frankly.

But amidst the current IPO run, a race to get public from companies we expected and some we did not, there’s still unicorn hijinks to keep tabs on. You see, while many companies are looking to go public in the current liquidity cycle, others are pursuing less conventional methods of selling shares without taking on the mantle of being a public company.

Indeed, held this week. This action does two things for the company:

1. Allows TransferWise to provide liquidity to existing shareholders;
2. Allows TransferWise to hold off on an IPO if it so desires.

How? It’s simple. An IPO turns a firm’s illiquid stock into a liquid security (pending lock-up periods and the like). This is a desirable result for investors, founders, and employees alike. And, it can help the firm make acquisitions as its equity is now priced more fairly and is easier to spend.

But if you want to get ���Dz�����of that done and avoid going public, you can just hold a big secondary sale. A secondary sale, unlike vending new shares, doesn’t generate new capital for the firm in question. Instead, it allows folks who already own stock in the company to offload some or all of their holdings.

Taking money off the table through a secondary — especially as a large secondary — was frowned upon in more conservative times. Why? It changes incentives, and makes some existing employees, perhaps, less concerned about the future value of the firm as they already cashed in some or all of their holdings.

However, such whiny, nerdy concerns are not very 2019. Indeed, in 2019 a $292 million secondary sale from unicorn TransferWise, a firm that repriced in the deal to a higher $3.5 billion valuation, will quickly fall into the background. It won’t make much of a splash. You will forget about this deal by tomorrow morning, even though it’s a big, meaningful event.

Here’s :

In a call, TransferWise co-founder and Chairman Taavet Hinrikus told me the round was oversubscribed, too. The arbitrary figure of $292 million was simply the result of how much liquidity existing shareholders were willing to make available, and nowhere near the upper level of interest.

Some existing investors bought more shares. Per , “growth capital investors Lead Edge Capital, Lone Pine Capital and Vitruvian Partners” led the financing event.

TransferWise can afford the secondary sale as it has had a . Indeed, the firm’s brought in $280 million to the company at a post-money valuation of just under $1.6 billion.

If that sum of money — close in size to the $292 million secondary trade — sounds like an IPO-scale haul, that’s because it is. Indeed, TransferWise has effectively gone public, in two parts, while private. First, in 2017 it raised an IPO-scale check with its Series E, and now with its huge secondary sale, the firm is providing lots of liquidity. Just like an IPO.

While money is cheap, expect more of this sort of thing. In time, we’ll get closer to the historical norms of liquidity. But we’re a long, long ways off from that day.

TransferWise Stats

The company emailed Crunchbase News a list of metrics along with the news of the sale. Aside from its whimsical claim that “the company has raised $689 million in primary and secondary funding” which felt like an odd use of the word “raise,” here are the interesting bits:

• In its fiscal year ending March 2018, TransferWise had revenue of around $148 million and “net profit” of $7.8 million using current currency conversions.
• Turning to more recent metrics, the firm claims “5 million customers worldwide, processing £4bn every month.”

This helps understand why everyone wants into TransferWise. Unicorns which are profitable and growing quickly are the real unicorns. By that I mean that they are actually rare. .

Unicorns that are quickly growing while generating net income? Those remind us of some other companies that did really well. Perhaps you recall how Facebook and Microsoft and Apple and Alphabet were all growing ���Ի���profitable when they went public?

Illustration: .