Dive Brief:

• Tensec, the Palo Alto, California-based cross-border payments startup, has raised $12 million, the company announced Wednesday.
• Costanoa Ventures led the funding round, with seven other firms, including Quiet Capital, WillowTree Investments, Cambrian VC and Ignia Partners, also participating in the round, the release said
• The funding will support the company’s efforts to facilitate cross-border payments, real-time payments and transaction banking services for global trading companies and their clients, per the press release.

Dive Insight:

With its latest funding round, the company aims to expand real-time payments and banking services to more small and medium-sized companies, the release said. 

Tensec says its clients handle $10 billion in annual trade volume. The company anticipates that its pending expansion into Europe and Asia will increase this annual trading volume to $30 billion, per the press release. 

“SMBs drive nearly half of global trade but have long been excluded from the financial tools that larger players rely on,” Helcio Nobre, CEO and co-founder of Tensec, said in a statement. “We’re flipping the model by empowering global trading companies to deliver these services directly to their partners—making global commerce faster, cheaper and more accessible.”

Tensec, like other cross-border fintechs, says it’s “targeting the massive cross-border payments infrastructure that still runs on 40-year-old SWIFT technology.” Global cross-border payments “remain largely untouched by innovation,” Tensec said in the release.

Meanwhile, other cross-border payment providers have been attracting investors recently. 

Last month, Palla Financial, another cross-border payments provider, received $14.5 million from Revolution Ventures, Y Combinator, Meta Fund and other investors. That same week, Conduit Technology, the cross-border payments provider using stablecoins, raised $36 million from Dragonfly and Altos Ventures and other investment firms. 

Alongside fundraising activities among cross-border payment companies, payment veterans are partnering with their international counterparts.

In April, PayPal Holdings subsidiary Xoom teamed up with Tencent to provide cross-border payments for Weixin Pay users. As part of the deal, customers in the U.S., Canada and Europe can access the service, but the company said it planned to expand the offering to more markets.