When Konstantin Surkov and Nick Ryabov left Netflix's Amsterdam engineering hub, they weren't chasing another streaming play. They'd spent years building payment rails that processed billions in subscription revenue, and they'd noticed something: Europe's shift away from cards was creating a performance problem no one was quite solving.
Now their startup, Nopan, has raised €7.2 million to prove merchants will pay for the unsexy work of making alternative payment methods actually work. The round, announced July 14, was led by Newion, with follow-on backing from Crane Venture Partners and Seedcamp, plus a handful of fintech and merchant-payments angels the company declined to name.
The timing isn't accidental. Wero—the European Payments Initiative's long-awaited pan-European wallet—has crossed 53 million users as of mid-2026, according to EPI. That's substantial traction for a scheme that only launched peer-to-peer transfers in 2024 and is now rolling out e-commerce acceptance across Germany, Belgium, and France. The Netherlands and Luxembourg are next, as iDEAL and Payconiq fold into the Wero framework.
But volume is one thing. Performance is another.
The Infrastructure Layer Nobody Notices
Nopan became a Principal Member of EPI in June, positioning itself not as a direct competitor to Wero but as the infrastructure layer that makes it viable for merchants wary of abandoning well-tuned card rails. The pitch: sit atop existing payment stacks, route transactions intelligently, and squeeze out better authorization rates, conversion, and cost transparency.
"Launching a new payment method is only the beginning," Surkov said in a statement that could double as the company's thesis. "The real challenge is making it perform reliably at scale."
That's a familiar refrain from payments veterans, though whether enterprise merchants—already juggling PSPs, acquirers, and regional quirks—will adopt yet another intermediary layer remains an open question. Nopan's nine-person team secured a Payment Institution license from De Nederlandsche Bank in November 2025, giving it the regulatory clearance to operate cross-border across the EU. The company is live with initial customers and says interest from enterprise merchants and PSPs is growing, though it hasn't disclosed names or volume figures.
Pieter Welten, a partner at Newion, framed the investment around what he called an infrastructure gap. "Account and wallet payments represent a major opportunity, but the infrastructure required to make them perform at scale is still emerging," he said. It's the kind of observation that sounds obvious until you consider how fragmented Europe's payment landscape remains—dozens of local schemes, varying acceptance rates, wildly different user experiences.
Nopan currently supports Wero, IRIS Commerce (Greece's account-to-account scheme), and Satispay, among other methods. The company's developer documentation suggests a technical approach aimed squarely at payments engineers accustomed to optimizing card networks. If you know how to tune fraud models and retry logic for Visa, Nopan wants you to think about A2A rails the same way.
Partnerships and Rollout
The fresh capital will fund three priorities, according to the company: expanding payment method coverage across Europe, developing optimization capabilities (read: smarter routing and decisioning), and strengthening commercial partnerships with digital businesses and PSPs.
Nopan has already inked deals that hint at its strategy. In June, it announced a partnership with Xsolla to deploy account and wallet payments for game developers—a vertical that's both high-volume and notoriously sensitive to payment friction. A separate deal with DIAS aims to help international merchants accept IRIS Commerce, which saw e-commerce volume grow over 70% in 2025, though from a relatively small base.
The company hasn't disclosed a valuation or how this €7.2 million breaks down against prior capital, if any. What's clear is the bet: as Europe's fragmented payment landscape consolidates around wallets and account-to-account rails, merchants will pay for the performance layer that makes those rails behave like cards.
Whether that infrastructure gap is big enough to support a venture-scale business—especially as PSPs and schemes build their own optimization tools—is the question Surkov and Ryabov are now paid to answer. They've got the regulatory license, the EPI membership, and a Rolodex from Netflix. What they need next is proof that merchants care as much about payment performance as they do about payment choice.
For now, that's still an open case.
