Payrails

Payrails GmbH is a German financial technology company that provides a modular payment operating system for global enterprises. Founded in Berlin in August 2021 by Orkhan Abdullayev, Emre Talay, and Nicolas Thouzeau, the company emerged from the founders' experience building and scaling the fintech arm of Delivery Hero. They identified the challenges large companies face in managing complex payment infrastructures across multiple providers and geographies. Abdullayev, the CEO, previously led payment infrastructure and financial operations at high-growth tech companies like Delivery Hero and foodpanda. Talay has a background in leading payment teams, focusing on operations, risk, and compliance. Payrails offers a unified platform designed to consolidate payment service providers (PSPs), fraud solutions, and other financial services into a single API integration. This approach provides businesses with a central system to manage their entire payment lifecycle. The company's core products include payment orchestration, a secure token vault, automated reconciliation, global payouts, and unified analytics. Its technology allows for smart payment routing to optimize costs and success rates, automated retries for failed transactions, and management of in-person payments. The platform is provider-agnostic, meaning it does not operate on a revenue-sharing model with PSPs, which allows for unbiased recommendations. It serves enterprise clients across various sectors such as mobility, e-commerce, travel, and subscription services, with notable customers including Puma, Vinted, and Flix. The company's business model is B2B SaaS, likely involving subscription fees combined with transaction or volume-based pricing. Payrails has secured significant funding from top-tier investors. It raised $6.4 million in a seed round in March 2022, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and HV Capital. This was followed by a seed extension and later a $32 million Series A round in June 2025, led by HV Capital's Growth Fund with participation from EQT Ventures, General Catalyst, and a16z, bringing its total funding to over $52 million. This capital is being used to accelerate product innovation and expand its commercial and product teams in offices across Berlin, London, Paris, Dublin, Cairo, and Dubai. Keywords: payment operating system, FinOps, payment orchestration, enterprise payments, B2B SaaS, payment infrastructure, single API, payment routing, ledger-based system, automated reconciliation, global payouts, token vault, unified analytics, fraud prevention integration, multi-currency processing, subscription billing, in-person payments, checkout conversion, payment acceptance, marketplace settlements