Payrails, a Berlin-based operating system for payments and financial services, just announced today that it has raised $6.4 million in seed funding.
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), that invested in Everyrealm and OpenSea lately, led the investment round along with participation from HV Capital, Delivery Hero CFO Emmanuel Thomassin, Flixbus founders Jochen Engert, André Schwämmlein and Daniel Krauss and Dominik Richter, founder of HelloFresh.
How will it use the fund?
The startup intends to use the fresh funds to launch its next-generation financial operations (FinOps) platform. Also, they will bring the cloud-based operating system Payrails OS to help enterprises manage payments and build financial services for customers worldwide.
Furthermore, Payrails is launching its industry-disrupting solution in Europe. Also, it plans to continue its fast-paced expansion in the region. It has started working with select clients using Payrails’ infrastructure to improve their payment performance.
In addition to these, the fintech will also continue to invest heavily in its team and product development. It aims to grow its headcount from 30 to 100 by the end of this year.
Orkhan Abdullayev, CEO and Co-Founder of Payrails, commented: “Our ledger-based operating system, Payrails OS, targets these challenges directly and allows enterprises to unlock value fast. In Andreessen Horowitz and HV Capital, we have found partners that share our vision and long-term view on how to enable high-growth companies to craft their payment experiences and financial services globally.”
Seema Amble, Investment Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said: “The Payrails team deeply understands the payment challenges facing merchants as they grow. The founders bring a wealth of experience and a strong track record of execution to build solutions for this category, helping customers minimize complexity as they grow and scale.”
Barbod Namini, Partner at HV Capital commented: “We are equally convinced of Payrails’ next-generation operating system as we are impressed by Payrails’ outstanding team. Given their in-depth experience from Delivery Hero, one of Europe’s largest tech champions, Payrails’ founding team uniquely understands the struggles and costs associated with complex, enterprise-level financial operations and have proven their capabilities.”
Founded by ex-Delivery Hero team
The young startup Payrails was founded in late 2021 by Orkhan Abdullayev, Emre Talay, and Nicolas Thouzeau. They have immense experience in payment and marketplace and previously built and scaled the fintech arm of Delivery Hero, the world’s largest delivery platform, across 30 countries.
Payrails brings value to all players in the payment ecosystem and significantly enhances payment experiences for the end-users.
With Payrails, businesses can leverage a single Application Programming Interface (API) to scale their payments and financial capabilities via smart payment routing, consolidated money movements, and payment reconciliation via ledgers.
On the other hand, enterprise clients can track their payments’ performance through unified analytics, thereby providing more control and visibility over a company’s financial operations and helping to reduce payment fraud.
Payrails offers Payment-Service-Providers (PSPs) an easier way to onboard new customers and enables payment acceptance for marketplaces.
What issue Payrails resolves?
As there is a surge in the adoption of digital payments, changes in payment habits, and the rise of local payment methods, enterprises are operating in a highly complex and fragmented payment environment.
Payrails eases this complexity by powering payments and financial services across countries, currencies, and payment methods through its end-to-end operating system.
Using this solution, merchants can more easily add new payment methods to serve their customers better and improve their authorisation rates while managing local compliance and regulatory requirements.
As of now, the fintech startup caters to enterprise clients across industries, including marketplaces, e-commerce, quick-commerce and mobility players. It is estimated that its solution will fill a critical void in the fast-growing $1.5 trillion digital payments market, which is estimated to reach $2.9 trillion by 2030.
