Paytrix Co-Founders, Aran Brown and Eddie Harrison recently noted that between them, they have been “working in payments for over 30 years.”
Across all aspects of the ecosystem – “from Card Issuing to Card Acquiring; Open Banking to Foreign Exchange and Cross Border Payments.”
Within each of these industry segments, they’ve “encountered challenges, run into technology limitations, and hit out-and-out brick walls.” Payments can be “painful.” Even more so when you need “to send funds across borders – it’s complex, expensive, and slow.”
But building these payment processes “internally to function as you want them to takes time, resource and expertise that most businesses simply don’t have.”
And using typical payments providers often “means integrating with 10+ partners, and giving up control due to being removed from the flow of funds.” Not to mention “the poor unit economics that come with this.”
As noted in a blog post:
“We knew we weren’t the only ones experiencing this endless friction. And we knew there must be a better way…In 2022, we founded Paytrix. In the beginning, it was just an idea – a dream. Amassed from our combined experiences and vision of what perfect would look like. We wanted to develop a solution that would enable businesses to unlock access to the best payments products around the world through one contract and one API. Meaning they could scale quickly and easily.”
The founders claim they “spoke to industry leaders, those battling at the front line against the problem we are trying to solve.” They validated their thinking and “gave invaluable insight into their experiences which would help shape Paytrix.”
They added:
“Almost immediately, we recognised that the only way to build this solution was to take a serious approach to compliance and regulation. Most early-stage businesses don’t – and for very good reason. Getting regulated is hard, let alone by those in gold-standard jurisdictions – it takes time, expertise and funding. But for us, this was a non-negotiable. It would allow us to unlock access to the most robust, secure and global payment capabilities.”
In May 2022 they “raised £5M – one of the largest pre-seed funding rounds in European FinTech History from an incredible group of Venture capital and Angel Investors including Bain Capital Ventures, Fin Capital, Hambro Perks, Clock Tower Ventures, Better Tomorrow Ventures and D4 Ventures.”
The founders added:
“We recognized that you can only build a world-class solution with a world-class team. So we used these funds to do just that. We’re thrilled to have welcomed Ed Adarrio, CTO (ex-Currency Cloud), Mike Southgate, Chief Compliance Officer (ex-Google), Peter Rowan, GM Ireland (ex-Paypal and Twitter) and David Sola, CFO (ex-Houlihan Lokey, UBS and Softbank) to the team, to support us in this mission.”
They continued:
“We’re now a team of almost 60 people, with hubs in 4 countries – and our ambition to hire only the very best hasn’t wavered. We’re incredibly lucky to have the support and dedication of such a stellar team. We have already developed phase one of the Paytrix solution and today, we are able to process Payouts in 130 currencies, and 200+ countries all around the world. We’ve onboarded our first customers representing hundreds of millions of flow. We’ve acquired a PI License. We’ve launched a Paytrix hub in Ireland.”
They also mentioned that it is “with great excitement and extreme thankfulness that we announce our $18.3M Series A funding round, led by Unusual Ventures, alongside Motive Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures.”
This injection of funding will “enable them to scale their platform as they build phase 2 of their solution: Payments in.”
They concluded:
“We’re currently hiring across the organization, from Business Development to Operations, Compliance and HR. By joining, not only will you play a pivotal role in helping us shake up the payments space, but we also offer some pretty amazing perks for all our employees.”