CHARLOTTE – One of Charlotte’s homegrown “unicorns,” AvidXchange, has made another acquisition, purchasing the Los Angeles- and Boston-based company FastPay.

The move seeks to expand AvidXchange’s portfolio of automated payments technologies and services to middle market companies across America’s media landscape, the company said in a statement announcing the acquisition.

The acquisition comes after two other acquisitions by AvidXchange: Core Associates was acquired in January 2021 and BankTEL was acquired in August 2019.  One of the technology platforms built by Core Associates prior to the acquisition, TimberScan, is now integrated with AvidPay, the company announced last week.

AvidXchange is eyeing a possible initial public offering of stock that would value the company at more than $7 billion. It’s already valued at more than $1 billion, thus earning the “unicorn” label in private equity circles.

Charlotte ‘unicorn’ AvidXchange reportedly considering IPO, $7B valuation

FastPay will now operate as “FastPay, an AvidXchange company,” beginning today, and will be led by Secil Baysal, senior vice president and general manager of media. Baysal was formerly the COO and president of FastPay, and is based in Los Angeles, according to a LinkedIn profile.

FastPay uses technology and analytics to provide services and solutions, the company noted in a statement, and has more than 70,000 media suppliers in a database.  The services and solutions the company provides seek to remedy what it calls an inefficient payment process and long payment terms that exist in the ecosystem.

“FastPay’s expertise and purpose-built set of payments automation solutions for the media industry are what excited us about the potential to have FastPay become a part of AvidXchange,” said Michael Praeger, CEO and Co-Founder of AvidXchange, in a statement.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.