Payrails, an operating system for payments and financial services, recently announced that it has secured $6.4 million in seed funding in order to launch its next-gen financial operations (FinOps) platform.
The firm’s investment round was reportedly led by Andreessen Horowitz with HV Capital, Delivery Hero CFO Emmanuel Thomassin, Flixbus founders Jochen Engert, André Schwämmlein and Daniel Krauss as well as Dominik Richter, founder of HelloFresh, making contributions as well.
Payrails was established in late 2021 by Orkhan Abdullayev, Emre Talay, and Nicolas Thouzeau – a team of payment and marketplace professionals who previously “built and scaled the FinTech arm of Delivery Hero, the world’s largest delivery platform, across 30 countries.”
With the funds raised, the team is introducing their Cloud-powered operating system, Payrails OS, to “help enterprises manage payments and build financial services for customers across the globe.”
Payrails brings value to all players in the payment ecosystem and “significantly enhances payment experiences for the end-user.”
With Payrails, businesses can “leverage a single API to scale their payments and financial capabilities via smart payment routing, consolidated money movements, and payment reconciliation via ledgers.”
At the same time, enterprise clients can “track their payments’ performance through unified analytics, providing more control and visibility over a company’s financial operations and helping to reduce payment fraud.”
Payment-Service-Providers (PSP) significantly “benefit from the solution as well. Payrails offers PSPs an easier way to onboard new customers and enables payment acceptance for marketplaces.”
With the increase in the adoption of digital payments, changes in payment habits, and the rise of local payment methods, enterprises are “operating in an increasingly complex and fragmented payment environment.”
Payrails abstracts this complexity by “powering payments and financial services across countries, currencies, and payment methods through its end-to-end operating system.”
With Payrails, merchants can thus “more easily add new payment methods to serve their customers better and improve their authorization rates while managing local compliance and regulatory requirements.”
Catering to enterprise clients across all industries, including marketplaces, e-commerce, quick-commerce and mobility players, the solution will “fill a critical void in the fast-growing $1.5 trillion digital payments market, expected to reach $2.9 trillion by 2030.”
Orkhan Abdullayev, CEO and Co-Founder of Payrails, commented:
“We are incredibly excited about the journey ahead of us. As we have experienced countless challenges related to building, operating, and scaling payments and financial services globally, we empathize with enterprises’ pain points. 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:
“As companies scale globally, they need infrastructure that allows them to quickly and easily add payment gateways and payment methods to be able to accept payments from their customers, as well as optimize their payment routes and authorization rates. 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 remarked:
“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. Based on the excellence of the team and their truly disruptive offering, we are excited to support them on their path to becoming the FinOps solution of choice for large enterprises.”
Payrails is launching its solution in Europe and plans “to continue its fast-paced expansion.” The company has started working “with select clients using Payrails’ infrastructure to improve their payment performance.”
The Fintech firm will also “continue to invest heavily in its team and product development – aiming to grow the headcount from 30 to 100 by the end of this year.”