Less than a month after making a fortune selling Mint Mobile for $1.35 billion to wireless giant T-Mobile, Hollywood heavyweight Ryan Reynolds is announcing his next move as an entrepreneur: an investment in Nuvei, a Canadian fintech company.
Reynolds‘ total investment in Nuvei was not disclosed, but his trademark humor was evident in the company’s announcement. “I know about as much about fintech as I knew about gin or cell phones a few years ago,” Reynolds said, according to the release. “But Nuvei is impressive. The leadership team is brilliant and hardworking, and it’s about time a Canadian company gets the kind of attention American tech companies get.”
Known for his roles in films such as the Deadpool franchise, Free Guy, Pokemon: Detective Pikachu and dozens of others, Reynolds has also distinguished himself in recent years as a prolific investor. In addition to Nuvei, he has also invested in Wealthsimple, 1Password and Aviation American Gin. Reynolds recently became co-owner of Welsh soccer club Wrexham Football Club – a purchase he made with his friend Rob McElhenney (of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia fame) and documented in FX’s Welcome to Wrexham series.
Despite all these responsibilities, he still needs to be done: Reynolds is also part of a group bidding for the National Hockey League’s Ottawa Senators, preparing for the filming of Deadpool 3 and running Maximum Effort, a film production and digital marketing company.
The only thing he doesn’t seem to be doing is building a rocket – something he joked about in a video he shared on Twitter today with Nuvei CEO Phil Fayer, apparently about Elon Musk.
Nuvei is a global payments company headquartered in Montreal that provides services such as card issuance, banking, and risk and fraud management. The company has been around for decades and was founded in 2003 as Pivotal Payments. In the United States, it went public in 2021 and trades on Nasdaq under the symbol NVEI. Although Reynolds‘ announcement didn’t catapult the company’s stock into the stratosphere, share prices are up more than 66% this year.
Reynolds and Fayer appeared on CNBC Monday morning to talk about Reynolds‘ investment, which Reynolds said he had been planning for two years. So why did he invest? At least a small part of the decision concerned Canadian pride.
“America gets a lot of credit for innovation, and I think there’s something quite funny and interesting and a fun story to tell about Canada flexing a little bit. This is already a multibillion-dollar global company with an amazing story to tell, and I look at these guys who are running it, and that’s a huge part of it for me,” the Vancouver-born Reynolds explained.
“While many people are running away from fintech, this is one company worth running toward.”
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