- Paypercut raises €5M seed round co-led by Concentric, Passion Capital, and Araya Ventures, bringing total funding to €7M
- The company has grown to more than 200 merchants across eight Central and Eastern European marketsc in under a year
- New funding will support regional expansion, an Irish EMI licence application, and stablecoin-powered cross-border payment rails
For many online merchants, expanding across Europe is relatively straightforward. Expanding across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) is a different story. Businesses often face a patchwork of local payment methods, currencies, regulations, and settlement systems that vary from market to market. Merchants entering a new country frequently need new integrations, new contracts, and entirely new payment setups.
Paypercut believes that complexity has held back one of Europe’s fastest-growing e-commerce regions for too long.
The fintech startup has raised a €5 million seed round co-led by Concentric, Passion Capital, and Araya Ventures, with participation from SMOK Ventures, Portfolio Ventures, BrightCap Ventures, BlackWood, SABAH.fund, MFG Invest, and payments entrepreneur Matt Doka. The latest financing brings the company’s total funding to €7 million.
Aims to solve the fragmentation holding CEE commerce back
Founded in 2024 by former senior leaders from SumUp, and Payhawk, Stoil Vasilev, Gareth Walsh, and Emil Savov, Paypercut was created to address a challenge the founders had experienced firsthand while scaling payment businesses across the region. Specifically: Stoil Vasilev (CEO) was formerly VP of Corporate Development at SumUp; Emil Savov (CRO) built SumUp’s CEE partner channel and founded 84bits, which was acquired by SumUp; and Gareth Walsh (COO) was Global Head of Risk & Compliance at SumUp and Chief Commercial Officer at Payhawk.
The team saw how merchants expanding across CEE repeatedly encountered the same obstacles: fragmented payment providers, country-specific payment methods, and operational complexity that slowed growth.
Paypercut was founded as a Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) aggregator and, as merchants demanded broader functionality, the company quickly evolved into a full payments platform.
Today, merchants can accept card payments, local payment methods, BNPL options, payment links, and QR-code payments through a single integration, while managing settlements and payouts across multiple currencies from one dashboard.
By eliminating the need for separate providers in every market, Paypercut aims to remove one of the biggest barriers to regional expansion.
“CEE has always been treated as an afterthought by the payments industry, seen as too fragmented, too many local specifics, too complicated. We built Paypercut to fix that. This round gives us the resources to go further and faster: more markets, more payment options for merchants, and the infrastructure to move money across the way it should have always worked, instantly and at a fraction of the cost,” says Stoil Vasilev.
The company’s growth suggests the demand is real. In less than twelve months, Paypercut is touted to have expanded to more than 200 active merchants across eight markets, transforming from a niche payments solution into a broader financial infrastructure platform.
Its newest product, Express Checkout, reflects that ambition. Launching this quarter, the feature allows customers to complete purchases directly from product pages using Apple Pay and Google Pay, reducing checkout friction and tackling one of e-commerce’s biggest challenges: mobile cart abandonment.
At the same time, the company has streamlined merchant onboarding, reducing a process that traditionally takes weeks into a fully digital experience that can be completed in days.
“Our merchants don’t care which rails their money travels on — they care that it arrives instantly, cheaply, and securely. Stablecoins are the first technology that lets us deliver all three across CEE’s non-euro corridors, and that’s why we’re building on them,” says Martin Palazov, head of expansion, Paypercut.
Building stablecoin rails for Europe’s most expensive corridors
While payments are one part of the equation, moving money across borders remains another. According to Paypercut’s own analysis, businesses operating across CEE’s non-euro markets pay more than €4 billion annually in foreign exchange and transaction fees. Cross-border transfers often take three to five business days when multiple currency conversions are involved.
Paypercut sees stablecoins as a way to solve that problem. Rather than positioning stablecoins as a standalone product, Paypercut is integrating them directly into its existing merchant infrastructure to make cross-border money movement faster and cheaper.
Investors’ attention
The funding will be used to accelerate expansion across Central and Eastern Europe, strengthen its presence in existing markets, advance product development, and support its Electronic Money Institution (EMI) licence application with the Central Bank of Ireland.
“We backed Paypercut at pre-seed because we believed in the team and the opportunity. A year later, the execution has matched the ambition. CEE remains one of Europe’s most underserved payments markets, and Paypercut is building the infrastructure it has long lacked,” says Will Orde, partner at Passion Capital.
“We’ve known the Paypercut team for over a year and were impressed by their ambition from day one. Building a working product across multiple markets in under a year made the decision to co-lead straightforward,” notes Rupa Popat, founder and managing partner at Araya Ventures.
“Paypercut combines deep fintech expertise, a regulated infrastructure play, and exceptional execution. Having backed the team at pre-seed, we were confident doubling down after seeing their progress,” notes Alex Stroud, general partner at Concentric.
Competition defining future of European payments
Paypercut operates in a highly competitive payments market alongside some of fintech’s biggest names. One relevant reference point is PayU GPO, which was acquired by Israeli fintech Rapyd in March 2025 for $610M and now operates as part of Rapyd’s broader payments infrastructure across CEE and emerging markets — a deal that itself signals how attractive the region has become to global payments players.
Prague-founded BNPL provider Twisto, once the leading native BNPL platform in CEE with nearly one million customers, was acquired by Australian firm Zip in 2021 and subsequently sold again to Turkish fintech Param in 2023 — leaving a gap in CEE’s independent BNPL infrastructure that Paypercut is now moving to fill.
Looking ahead
Paypercut is betting that merchants do not want separate providers for payments, settlements, foreign exchange, and cross-border money movement. They want a single financial infrastructure layer that works seamlessly across markets.
With fresh funding, growing merchant adoption, and plans to introduce stablecoin-powered cross-border rails, the company is positioning itself to become the financial operating system for commerce across Central and Eastern Europe.
