Ex-Netflix payments engineers raise €7.2 million to bring card-level reliability to account-to-account payments #

Amsterdam fintech Nopan has raised €7.2 million in total to build a performance optimisation layer between digital merchants and account-to-account and wallet payment systems. The latest round was led by Dutch venture capital firm Newion, with follow-on participation from existing backers Crane and Seedcamp and additional support from angel investors with backgrounds in merchant payments and fintech.

The company was founded in 2024 by Konstantin Surkov and Nick Ryabov, who previously worked together on Netflix’s payments team at the streaming company’s European headquarters in Amsterdam. Surkov, who also held roles at Visa and Global Payments, focused on payment processing and fee optimisation at Netflix; Ryabov brought engineering experience from Netflix and Microsoft. The two say they observed a recurring pattern there: account and wallet payment methods would launch with promise but run into performance problems as transaction volumes grew.

Nopan does not build new payment connections from scratch. It improves the routing, bank connectivity and operational performance of account and wallet methods that merchants have already deployed. Retailers integrating pan-European schemes such as Wero at checkout often see higher failure and abandonment rates than they do with card transactions. Nopan targets that gap by optimising bank connectivity, routing logic and payment method behaviour on an ongoing basis. The goal is to give digital businesses and payment service providers the conversion rates and operational maturity they have long relied on with cards.

Surkov, who serves as co-founder and CEO, said the company was built on the conviction that launching a payment method is only the starting point, and that the more valuable work is making it perform reliably across different banks, customer behaviours and markets.

Newion partner Pieter Welten said the infrastructure needed to make account and wallet payments perform at scale is still developing, and that Nopan addresses a clear and growing market need.

The company, which now employs nine people, holds a payment institution licence from the Dutch central bank and is a Principal Member of the European Payments Initiative, the EPI consortium behind the Wero wallet. It says it is already live with initial customers and is seeing growing interest from enterprise merchants and PSPs across Europe. The new capital will fund expansion of payment method coverage across the continent, further development of its optimisation capabilities and growth of its commercial team.

Source: Tech.eu