Restaurants, bars, and clubs face a persistent challenge: legacy systems that stutter during peak service hours, disrupting operations and revenue. Klearly solves this with a hospitality-first payments layer designed for speed, reliability, and integration into high-traffic environments.
Klearly just raised €12M in Series A funding, led by PayPal Ventures and joined by Italian Founders Fund, Global PayTech Ventures, Antler Elevate, and Shapers. This brings total funding to €20M.
Building Europe’s payments system for restaurants, bars, and clubs
Founded in 2017 by Sam Koekoek, Eva Rosa Bian, Geus Walder, Edan Dil, and Guy Griv, Klearly fills a gap in hospitality, which remains one of Europe’s largest yet least integrated payment categories.
Sam Koekoek, CEO of Klearly, commented: “Klearly has a simple mission: to build Europe’s best payments system for restaurants, bars, and clubs. We’re not a generic payments player, and we don’t force merchants to switch POS. Instead, we provide a payment layer purpose-built for hospitality that supports leading operators and the leading POS providers.”
Klearly’s core technology is a device-agnostic payments platform that integrates directly with existing restaurant POS systems, eliminating the need for new equipment or full overhauls. Other features include lightning-fast processing for high-volume service, standalone deployment options, and deep compatibility with top POS providers.
Koekoek tells TFN, ” Klearly is hardware-agnostic, easy to deploy, and deeply integrated with leading POS systems. But the key is how we think about payments: not as the end of the meal, but as a moment to drive revenue and retention. We use the payment interaction to enable features that help restaurants turn guests into repeat customers and brand ambassadors.”
Unlike Adyen, SumUp, and Mollie, Klearly avoids the “rip-and-replace” model of generic competitors, focusing exclusively on hospitality needs such as peak-hour resilience.
What about diversity?
When we asked about diversity, Koekoek notes, “We’re still a relatively small team, and we don’t track these figures. That said, Klearly is quite diverse; our team includes people from multiple countries and backgrounds, and a significant percentage are expats/immigrants working across our hubs.”
What’s next?
With over 4,000 merchants in the Netherlands driving nearly €1BN in annualised total payment volume, Klearly aims to scale go-to-market efforts in Italy, expand into Belgium, and forge deeper POS partnerships.
The company will also invest heavily in product development, engineering hires, operations growth, and commercial teams to handle surging demand.
Koekoek concludes, “Over the next three to five years, our goal is to make paying in restaurants frictionless, integrated into the service flow, and increasingly invisible, while giving operators a modern payment layer that also drives loyalty, repeat visits, and higher revenue per guest.”
