Engineers cost $20k a month. They want to hire them faster than they can add $666,000 of processed transactions a month. This suggests taking investment.

heard you throw this figure around before. Can you break that out more? How much of that is salary, and how much is benefits? And this is location dependent, no?

In USA, you can reasonably expect to pay a developer around 100k. Add 50% overhead and the cost to company is around 150k translating to 12.5k a month. Adjust this number towards 20k/month if you are hiring in the valley.

The difference between small business and a startup is that small businesses scale linearly while startups scale exponentially. And organic growth is usually more linear-ish. The investment makes in exponential.

I have no idea, but I find it easy to find plausible reasons to raise money. Hiring a team of engineers to implement all the great things they have in the pipeline? Getting a sales team to get big deals with content producers? Buying lots of ads?