> so it seems unusual that they'd also acquire the company (why not acquire it back then?) Not unusual at all. Pretty typical for CVC in fact. Couple of factor

> so it seems unusual that they'd also acquire the company (why not acquire it back then?) Not unusual at all. Pretty typical for CVC in fact. Couple of factors: 1. CVC (Corporate Venture Capital) typically tries to invest in similar markets of companies that either are competitive or pseduo-competitive (think of it as a hedge). For example, this would be like PayPal investing in Venmo. 2. It's cheaper in the long run for a CVC to make 10 of these bets to find that one that doesn't kill their core business model (usually a cash cow). That's why you see Ford/GM putting money into self-driving car start-ups. 3. They were probably not at the level of scale ready for Visa to take them on at the time of the Series C. This was basically a down-payment for their eventual acquisition. It basically "you're too risky for us to buy, so here's some money that we can write off if you end up failing, but if you do fail, we don't have to deal with all of the crap that goes with a failing bus unit (layoffs, compliance, etc).