Helcim has raised C$53 ($38M USD) million to buy share in a Canadian small-business payments market that several of its largest competitors are quietly walking away from.

The Calgary company announced the Series C on Aug 21, 2026. BDC Capital's Growth Venture Fund led, with new investors Curql Collective and Gold House Ventures joining existing backers Headline, Aquiline, Information Venture Partners, Vesey Ventures, Clocktower Ventures and Alberta Accelerate Fund. The figures are Canadian dollars throughout — C$53 million works out to roughly US$38 million. The round values Helcim at C$250 million, up from the C$97 million it carried at its 2024 Series B.

What the company does

Helcim sells end-to-end payment processing to small and mid-sized merchants in Canada and the United States: point-of-sale software and a smart terminal, invoicing, online checkout, recurring billing and embedded payments tools that let other software companies process on its rails. Its differentiator has always been pricing rather than product breadth — published interchange-plus rates that step down as a merchant's volume climbs, aimed squarely at owners who found bank merchant services opaque.

Founder and chief executive Nicolas Beique, a self-taught programmer, ran the business without outside capital for well over a decade; the company describes itself as bootstrapped since 2008 and did not take a Series A until 2022. It now employs about 200 people.

The numbers behind the round

Helcim says it serves more than 22,000 active businesses, processes close to C$10 billion in annual payment volume, and has crossed C$150 million in annual recurring revenue. It has raised C$100 million in equity since that 2022 Series A.

Those figures explain the valuation more than they flatter it. At C$250 million, Helcim is priced at under two times its stated recurring revenue — a modest multiple by fintech standards, and a reminder that most of a processor's top line is volume flowing through at thin spreads rather than software margin. The more telling number is the valuation trajectory: two and a half times in two years, on a business that spent its first decade growing without a term sheet.

Why the timing matters

The round is explicitly a bet on incumbent retreat. Canadian banks and legacy acquirers have been shedding or shutting small-business merchant portfolios, and Helcim is positioning itself as the destination for the merchants left behind. There is a real void in the market right now and merchants are coming to Helcim faster than ever, Beique said in the announcement. He told BetaKit the shift arrived alongside internal momentum, describing huge momentum in the business at the same moment the market moved in the company's favour.

The investor list reads as strategy. BDC Capital is the venture arm of a Crown corporation whose mandate is Canadian small business, and Curql Collective is backed by credit unions — precisely the regional institutions Helcim says it wants to partner with more deeply. The stated use of funds is platform investment, hiring, a push up-market toward larger merchants, and expansion into adjacent financial services beyond card acceptance.

That last item is the real ambition. Processing payments is a commodity with well-capitalized global competitors; holding deposits, lending and running the financial stack for 22,000 merchants is a different business, and a harder one to leave.

Source

BetaKit — "Helcim raises C$53 million amid shakeup in Canadian payments"