Payrails on Track to Expand After Raising $14.4 Million

Germany’s Payrails has raised $14.4 million to help businesses streamline payment reconciliations and refunds.

The Berlin-based startup, founded by a group of Delivery Hero veterans, announced the funding on its LinkedIn page Wednesday (June 7).

Payrails says its operating system lets businesses “build, operate, and scale payment acceptance and embed financial services” with no in-house infrastructure.

“We’re building an operating system for fast-growing tech companies to manage payment operations and support workflows, we’ve got our product to the right stage and had good impact with first adopters,” Co-founder and CEO Orkhan Abdullayev told Business Insider.

“We’ve grown and now have large enterprises using the product so the fundraising is a decision to help us accelerate our product roadmap.”

As PYMNTS reported earlier this year, manual reconciliation of customers’ bill payments is the most common headache payment executives face when their customers go to pay their bills.

It’s an especially sore point for the healthcare sector, where 57.6% of finance executives cited it as their most pressing issue. It’s also a problem in the government services space, where a third of executives say they wanted a better option. And among utility company leaders, 41.8% of bill pay departments said they wanted an easier solution than manually reconciling their customers’ transaction information.

Research in PYMNTS’ “The One-Stop Bill Pay Playbook” shows that 30% of billing and collections executives are unsatisfied with their organizations’ bill payments overall ecosystem, and more than two-thirds (68%) expect their businesses to tackle innovations to ease payment headaches, such as one-stop-shop solutions, within the next calendar year.

The latest Payrails funding round follows a $6.4 million infusion the company received last year. As PYMNTS wrote at the time, the company’s goal is to help enterprises to operate without having to purchase complicated and expensive infrastructure.

“I like to compare our goals to what happened with cloud computing,” Abdullayev told Sifted.eu, referring to a time when companies had high overhead to maintain servers.

That situation changed when cloud services such Amazon and Google began offering customizable, scalable, user-friendly products, he said.

As PYMNTS reported at the time,  Payrails’ API allows businesses to scale their payments and financial capabilities via smart payment routing and consolidated money movements. Analytics measure performance and increase visibility into overall financial operations.