Round co-led by Concentric, Passion Capital, and Araya Ventures brings total funding to EUR 7M, accelerating market expansion, new product development, and the company's EMI license application with the Central Bank of Ireland

SOFIA, Bulgaria, June 3, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Paypercut, a European fintech payments platform enabling online merchants to accept payments across Central and Eastern Europe through a single integration, today announced a EUR 5M seed round co-led by Concentric, Passion Capital, and Araya Ventures. The round also saw participation from SMOK Ventures, Portfolio Ventures, BrightCap Ventures, BlackWood, SABAH.fund, MFG Invest, Main Set and payments entrepreneur Matt Doka, bringing Paypercut's total funding to EUR 7M.

The new capital will be used to accelerate expansion across CEE, deepen Paypercut's presence in existing markets, advance the next phase of product and infrastructure development, and meet the capital requirements for our Irish EMI licence.

Paypercut is not starting from zero. Since its EUR 2M pre-seed round in July 2025, the company has grown from a BNPL aggregator to a full payments platform, with over 200 merchants already active across eight markets in CEE. The round is fuel for what is already working -- and for what comes next.

"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," said Stoil Vasilev, Co-Founder and CEO, Paypercut.

What Paypercut does today

Paypercut gives online merchants across Central and Eastern Europe access to a full payments stack through a single integration -- no separate contracts per market, no fragmented providers, no localisation headache. Merchants can accept card payments and local payment methods, offer multiple Buy Now Pay Later options at checkout, send payment links and QR codes without a website, and manage billing, payouts, and settlements across currencies from a single dashboard.

The platform is built around the specific realities of CEE commerce: local payment methods, multi-currency settlement, and onboarding that compresses what is typically weeks of paperwork into a matter of days, fully online. For merchants expanding across the region, it eliminates the single biggest operational barrier -- having to start from scratch in every new market.

The latest addition to the platform is Express Checkout, launching this quarter, which moves the payment moment to the product page, before the customer ever reaches a basket. By enabling one-tap payments via Apple Pay and Google Pay with biometric authentication, Express Checkout eliminates the most significant source of mobile checkout abandonment: typing card details on a small screen. Card data never touches the merchant's servers, chargeback rates drop, and customers complete payment in two taps. For CEE merchants competing for mobile-first consumers, it is a meaningful shift in how checkout works, not an incremental update.

Paypercut operates through licensed and regulated partners across the EEA, ensuring full compliance in every market it serves. The company has also submitted its own EMI application under the Central Bank of Ireland, with authorisation expected in Q4 2026 -- a milestone that will enable Paypercut to hold customer balances directly and further expand its product capabilities.

"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 is one of the most underserved payments markets in Europe, and Paypercut is building the infrastructure layer the region has been missing. We are proud to continue leading this journey," said Will Orde, Partner, Passion Capital.

"We have known the Paypercut team for over a year and loved the ambition from the start. When you see a team execute the way they have, building a working product across multiple markets in under a year, the decision to co-lead becomes easy," said Rupa Popat, Founder & Managing Partner, Araya Ventures.

"Paypercut sits exactly at the intersection of what we love to invest in: deep fintech expertise, a regulated infrastructure play, and a team that knows what world class execution looks like. We backed them at pre-seed and witnessing the developments since, we had the confidence to double down," said Alex Stroud, Concentric, General Partner.

Cross-border payments for CEE

For decades, moving money across Central and Eastern Europe has meant navigating a fragmented web of legacy rails - slow, expensive, and built for a financial system that no longer reflects how businesses actually operate. According to Paypercut's analysis, businesses across CEE's non-euro markets pay an estimated more than EUR 4 billion annually in cross-border transaction fees and FX costs alone, with cross-currency SWIFT transfers between two CEE markets (such as PLN to HUF or CZK to RON) averaging 3–5 business days when intermediary currency conversion is required.

Building on a payments infrastructure already trusted by merchants across multiple European markets, Paypercut is developing rails for stablecoins targeting the region's highest-volume and most underserved corridors, starting with the likes of EUR-to-PLN and EUR-to-RON, and expanding as its regulatory footprint grows.

What began as a merchant payments platform is now becoming the full financial infrastructure layer designed for CEE: the stablecoin rails are not a new direction, they are the natural next element of the same infrastructure already working for merchants across the region. The same platform that today helps merchants accept payments will tomorrow enable them to move money across borders instantly, without switching providers, without new integrations, and without the friction that has defined cross-border payments in CEE for too long.

"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," said Martin Palazov, Head of Expansion, Paypercut.

About Paypercut

Paypercut is a European fintech payments platform enabling online merchants to accept payments across Central and Eastern Europe through a single integration. By bringing together card payments, local payment methods, and Buy Now, Pay Later providers, Paypercut eliminates the need for separate contracts and integrations in every new market, while optimising transaction approvals, conversion, and costs, and simplifying settlement and cross-border operations.

Founded by a team with deep experience scaling payments across the region, including former senior leaders from SumUp and Payhawk, Paypercut has raised a total of EUR 7M to date, backed by Concentric, Passion Capital, Araya Ventures, among others. The company is building toward becoming the default financial infrastructure layer for businesses across CEE, with a roadmap extending into treasury, FX, payouts, and embedded financial services.

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SOURCE Paypercut