Hiroki Takeuchi was a student at the University of Oxford when he started GoCardless in January 2011 with Tom Blomfield and Matt Robinson. Their idea was simple. Collecting money from customers every month is hard for small businesses, and direct debit was mostly open to large firms.
Y Combinator invested £125,000 in 2011. About £1.5 million followed in 2012 from Y Combinator, Google Ventures, Salesforce and Accel. Balderton led a US$7 million Series B in 2014.
GoCardless launched in the UK in 2013 and in France, Germany and Spain in 2014. It reached the US in 2018 and became a unicorn in 2020, when it also opened in Australia and New Zealand. Rivals include Stripe, Adyen, PayPal, Mollie and Checkout.com.
A US$312 million round in 2022 valued the company at US$2.1 billion. It bought Nordigen in 2022 and Sentenial in 2024. In December 2025 Mollie agreed to buy GoCardless for £1.05 billion, below the 2022 valuation.