Pagos is a payment intelligence infrastructure startup. Former Braintree and PayPal execs founded this startup earlier this year. It has raised $10 million in seed funding.
The remote-first Pagos is building a data platform and API-driven micro-services. As per the reports, it can integrate with any payment stack. The end goal is to drive better performance and “optimization” of a business’ existing payments infrastructure.
Inspiration behind the concept of Pagos
The concept was born out of the founding team’s experience at their previous companies. CEO Klas Bäck and CPO Albert Drouart held senior leadership positions at Braintree/Venmo and PayPal over the last eight to nine years. Braintree/Venmo was later acquired by PayPal. The pair also worked together at payment processor Netgiro which was later sold to Digital River. Daniel Blomberg, the company’s CTO, has launched seven startups and sold five over the last two decades.
What do the founders and investors think?
According to Klas Bäck, the challenge was that the customers didn’t have enough knowledge, data, or the tools to execute and optimize a strategy around the payment process. It means that they have a harder time doing all the things to produce the results they want.
Hence this can lead to higher operating costs and friction in executing the business strategy.
Therefore to address this concern, Pagos planned to build a SaaS platform with the API-driven micro-services to help companies optimize the payment processing and its execution.
This is exactly what won over Underscore VC and Point72 Ventures. They co-led Pagos’ seed round. Along with them were angels including former Venmo GM and current Accel investor Amit Jhawar; Bill Ready, Google’s president of commerce & payments; Billy Chen, VP of financial partnerships at Finix and former director of payments at Uber; and Rich LaBarca, GM of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights at Microsoft.
Future plans
In a very short time, Pagos has managed to offer services such as immediate payment data visualizations, automatic notifications on payment trends or problems and up-to-date bank identification number (BIN) details to manage customers and track costs. In future, the company is planning to offer network tokenization and account updater services.
Over time, the team plans on delivering more than a dozen individual micro-services that solve specific payment optimization challenges. All these will be accessible via APIs.
And since there is no such thing as ‘one size fits all, they are available completely unbundled, free to try and individually priced when used at scale.
Since day one, the company has been working with customers on a global scale, from 50-person companies to others that are selling billions of dollars of products and services online.
The company plans to use its new capital mostly to scale its 20-person team, particularly engineers.