Paypercut raises €5m seed round to expand cross-border CEE payments and pursue Irish EMI licence

Paypercut has closed a €5m seed round to push deeper into Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), develop its product stack, and fund its Irish Electronic Money Institution (EMI) licence application. For PSPs and high-risk merchants, the interesting part is not the headline number; it is the company’s attempt to combine one integration, local payment methods, and future licence-backed balance holding across fragmented CEE markets.

1. The round was co-led by Concentric, Passion Capital, and Araya Ventures. Additional participants included SMOK Ventures, Portfolio Ventures, BrightCap Ventures, BlackWood, SABAH.fund, MFG Invest, Main Set, and payments entrepreneur Matt Doka.
2. The proceeds are earmarked for expansion into additional CEE markets, deeper coverage in markets already served, product and infrastructure development, and the capital requirements tied to the EMI application. Paypercut submitted the application to the Central Bank of Ireland and expects authorisation in Q4 2026.
3. If authorised, Paypercut would be able to hold customer balances directly and expand its product capabilities. Until then, it operates through licensed and regulated partners across the European Economic Area to stay compliant in every market it serves.
4. The seed round follows a €2m pre-seed in July 2025. Since then, Paypercut says it has moved from being a buy now, pay later (BNPL) aggregator to a full payments platform, with more than 200 active merchants across eight markets.
5. One of the next product launches is Express Checkout, due this quarter. It moves the payment step to the product page before a customer reaches the basket, supports one-tap payments through Apple Pay and Google Pay with biometric authentication, and is designed to reduce mobile checkout abandonment while keeping card data off merchant servers to lower chargeback exposure.

Paypercut is also building stablecoin-based payment rails for CEE’s most active and underserved cross-border corridors, starting with EUR-to-PLN and EUR-to-RON routes. The company estimates that businesses in CEE’s non-euro markets pay more than €4bn annually in cross-border transaction fees and FX costs, and says cross-currency SWIFT transfers between two CEE markets take three to five business days when intermediary currency conversion is required.

On the merchant side, the pitch is straightforward: one integration, no separate contracts per market, no need to stitch together multiple local providers, and less localisation work. Merchants can accept cards and local payment methods, offer BNPL options, issue payment links and QR codes without a website, and manage billing, payouts, and multi-currency settlements from one dashboard. Onboarding, which usually takes weeks, has been reduced to a fully online process that takes days.