Payment infrastructure startup NORBr raises €1 million

Investment practice  

Venture Capital

Focus areas

E-commerceFinTech

The Dutch fintech provides merchants and PSPs with a no-code payment stack that enables them to easily connect to payment partners around the world at each step of the payment journey from the authentication to the payment processing itself. Since their official launch in 2021, the company has built partnerships with a large ecosystem of thirty payment providers such as Cybersource, Axepta by BNP Paribas, Stripe, Volt and Scalapay.

After twenty years in the payment industry, we thought about how difficult it is for large digital merchants to build a payment stack that stays agile over time and allows them to open and grow new markets without overloading their technical staff with complex IT projects that hurt their time-to-market. So, we decided to create a smart abstraction layer that sits between the merchant and its partners (SCA providers, risk assessment engines, PSPs, etc.) and let payment managers rapidly activate new connections and workflows through our no-code web console,” said Nabil NAIMY, CEO of the company.

Beyond the technical complexity of growing a payment stack, the market accounts for more than 6,000 payment companies which each provide their own geographical coverage, payment methods and services. It makes it even more time-consuming for payment managers to identify the right partners and understand their actual performance. The issue here is that when it comes to buying payment services, their quality and reality can only be assessed once the merchant has gone through the market screening, the legal contracting, the compliance, and the technical integration with the payment partner. The latest being the most impacting and resource hungry of all.

Thanks to NORBr, merchants can gain control over their payment stack, move faster, and make better decisions. They can also afford working with smaller payment partners and payment methods and even try challengers. The team also realized that merchants were not the only party benefiting from NORBr’s platform. More and more PSPs rely on NORBr to upgrade some of their offering: payment connectivity, reconciliation, smarter checkout, and e-commerce plugins. Therefore, NORBr recently launched a white label product designed for acquirers and payment companies. They can fully rely on NORBr’s technology and provide their clients with the latest technologies and payment experience.

So far Norbr has mainly been bootstrapped by its founder and CEO Nabil Naimy. In 2021 an angel syndicate of payment experts provided pre-seed investment to the company but the current funding from CEE-based multi-stage investor, Portfolion is the first time the company receives money from an institutional investor. “Efficiently managing payments between multiple parties and across different geographies has become so complex that some large companies now employ payment teams of more than 100 people. NORBr’s payment infrastructure enables online merchants and marketplaces to fully outsource this complexity while gaining more control over their payment operations.

Nabil and his team have proven to be successful harbingers of new payment trends multiple times over the past 20 years.

We are excited to join the next chapter of their journey as they take on the simplification of global multi-relational payment operations for all online businesses,” says Márk Pálfalvi, Principal at Portfolion.

With the recent funding and its two offers targeting both merchants and PSPs, NORBr aims to become the global distribution platform for payment-related services.

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