Italy's Satispay aims to triple users by 2023, grow abroad

ROME (Reuters) - Satispay aims to triple its users by the end of 2022 and will use cash from new investors including Jack Dorsey's Square Inc to grow in Italy and abroad, the head of the Italian mobile payment start-up said in a newspaper interview.

"Tripling (users) means increasing transactions five-fold ... and revenues seven-fold," CEO Alberto Dalmasso told newspaper Corriere della Sera's L'Economia Monday supplement.

Founded in 2013, Satispay provides a mobile app for payments in shops and for money exchanges between users. It is used by 300,000 people and 135,000 shopkeepers and expects revenues of 40 million euros at the of the year, Dalmasso said.

Square Inc, the Californian mobile payments firm created by Twitter's co-founder Dorsey, invested 15 million euros in Satispay earlier this month.

New investors in Satispay, which include U.S. firm LGT Lightstone, China's Tencent and Italy's TIM Ventures, the venture arm of Telecom Italia, will subscribe to a 68 million euro share issue.

Dalmasso said he expected the deal to close by the end of the year and that cooperative banking group Iccrea, which invested in Satispay in 2014, would exit the group's capital.

He said Satispay wanted to become a "point of reference in Europe for the payments sector" and that it aimed to grow internationally, but not through acquisitions.

(Reporting by Giulia Segreti; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)