German fintech Payrails secures $6.4m in funding from Andreessen Horowitz

Payrails, a Berlin-based fintech, exited stealth mode today after securing $6.4m in funding led by a16z.

Berlin-based fintech Payrails exited stealth mode today after securing $6.4m in funding in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

HV Capital, Delivery Hero CFO Emmanuel Thomassin, Flixbus founders Jochen Engert, André Schwämmlein and Daniel Krauss as well as HelloFresh founder Dominik Richter also joined the round.

The operating system for payments and financial services enables high-growth companies to “craft their payment experiences and financial services”, and will use the funding to launch its new financial operations platform.

Founded in late 2021 by Orkhan Abdullayev, Emre Talay, and Nicolas Thouzeau, the startup is launching its cloud-based operating system Payrails OS off the back of this funding round.

They are seeking to address the roughly $1.5 trillion digital payments market, which is expected to reach $2.9 trillion in the next eight years.

“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,” Payrails CEO Abdullayev said.

“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.”

Payrails is launching the “industry-disrupting solution” in Europe, with plans to continue expanding.

"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,” said Andreessen Horowitz investment partner Seema Amble. 

She added that the Payrails team “deeply understands” the payment challenges that merchants face as they grow. 

Using Payrails, businesses can use a single Application Programming Interface to scale payments and financial capabilities across countries, currencies and payment methods.

They can also track their payments’ performance through unified analytics, which Payrails says provides more control and visibility over a company’s financial operations, to help reduce payment fraud.