Payhawk is officially Bulgaria’s first unicorn

Payhawk is officially Bulgaria’s first unicorn(therecursive.com)

104 points by zhan_eg 4 years ago | 39 comments

LeonM 4 years ago |

Can't help to notice that all of [european_country]'s first unicorns are payment service providers.

Scalapay (it), Adyen (nl), now Payhawk. And probably a few more that I'm missing here.

gostsamo 4 years ago | |

Few years ago the EU adopted a manditory api standard for all of its banks. This, together with the lack of really big big banks and payment providers on the market, might've helped with opening the space to newcomers.

Jommi 4 years ago | | |

It hasn't been fully adapted at all yet though.

krageon 4 years ago | |

Payment services (if you wanted them to work) were for a long time predominantly US-based. I'm very happy this is changing.

phphphphp 4 years ago | |

I’ll take a somewhat contrarian view to the other comments. There’s definitely a great deal of room for payment service providers outside the US so I don’t mean to discredit Payhawk’s success (I know nothing about them — they could be wonderful with a long life ahead) but Europe is going through somewhat of a FinTech bubble, a lot of these companies have very shaky futures when capital dries up. I don’t know if it’s a consequence of Stripe’s success, cryptocurrency induced finance obsession, the low barrier to entry… or a combination, but it’s a very frothy market here.

ascar 4 years ago | | |

I see a lot of local effort in FinTech and in Health/MedTech. I think it's because both markets usually have a massive amount of local (i.e. national) legislation and bureaucratic red tape, making international solutions less applicable than solutions from the local market.

I actually expect to see the same happening with cloud services. Don't be surprised if Google, Amazon and Microsoft cloud services are driven out of the European market, because privacy laws make it illegal to host data on a Non-EU owned company (current rulings effectively already mean this, we are just short of really enforcing it. c.f. Schrems II).

simiones 4 years ago | |

For what it's worth, Romania's (UiPath) was not, they were a UI automation company. It doesn't detract from the pattern, but it does show it's not the only thing that has worked.

cleancoder0 4 years ago | |

Croatia's first unicorn was Infobip, one of the world's largest providers of A2P SMS services.

imtringued 4 years ago | |

Well, its impressive because London was supposed to monopolize this market.

Hanschri 4 years ago | |

Klarna (SE) is pretty big too.

drexlspivey 4 years ago |

Similar recent news: Italy gets its first unicorn as Scalapay raises $497m from Tencent [1] JP Morgan Viva Wallet Deal Creates Greece’s First FinTech Unicorn [2]

Seems like the easiest path to unicorn status is to create a country’s first mobile wallet/payment processor

[1] https://sifted.eu/articles/italy-first-unicorn-scalapay-tenc... [2] https://greekreporter.com/2022/02/01/jp-morgan-viva-wallet-g...

slavoingilizov 4 years ago |

I'm so happy to read this (a proud Bulgarian). The founders are amazing! We need more examples like these in Eastern Europe that can promote and create an environment for entrepreneurs.

ChuckNorris89 4 years ago | |

Definitely. I hope Bulgaria and Romania rise up from just being seen as cheap outsourcing hubs and tax havens.

And I hope our governments become less corrupt and incompetent so that our talent doesn't feel the need to move West, although this seems more difficult to solve than the tech hub part.

ReaLNero 4 years ago | | |

It's not just about government corruption. Time zones, labor laws, less entrepreneurial mindsets are examples of reasons why there's brain drain from Sweden, Germany, UK to US.

giorgioz 4 years ago |

> https://payhawk.com offers 3% cashback on card payments up to the full amount of your subscription.

So they seem to offer corporate cards to at least in UK, Germany and Spain. There are 2 public plans at €149/mo and €299/mo. Does that mean that they will offer up to 3% cashback until you reach the 149€/mo or 299€/mo? In that case you are not really getting a cashback but getting their service for free if you spend enough...

COMPETITORS I KNOW OF:

https://wise.com offers free business bank accounts with pre-paid cards in a LOT of countries (US and EU and many more)

https://mercury.com offers free business bank accounts with pre-paid cards in the US.

https://airbase.com offers free cash back business credit cards but not accounts (it can be paired with mercury.com or wise.com for the bank accounts) in the US.

artemonster 4 years ago |

I am out of the loop: why we need so many payment processors? Why they can raise so much money and immediately valued so high? What is that they provide so valuable what is not provided anywhere else?

m12k 4 years ago | |

I think it means the existing payment market is so massively profitable that you can undercut them and still make a killing.

seer 4 years ago | |

I don't think Payhawk are a payment processor, they use MasterCard under the hood. They are more like aggregator and analytics for corporate payment accounts.

xgb84j 4 years ago | |

I was wondering the same thing! I always assumed that payment processing was one of the most "winner-takes-it-all" business models out there.

heftig 4 years ago | | |

I guess one reason is that initial growth of online service providers (and especially payment processing) is often driven by sex-related use, e.g. sex work or art.

If the provider becomes "mainstream enough", these uses then get banned to satisfy investors, key customers and upstream services, driving the demand to the next startups.

PS: Or rather, were always banned from the start, but enforcement was lax until they were no longer an important part of the customer base.

urthor 4 years ago | |

It's not about marginal utility, it's about the revenue model.

Very easy to monetize a payments platform.

dgellow 4 years ago |

Not to diminish their success, but isn’t it odd to have this concept of unicorn based on a fixed threshold? Due to inflation, isn’t reaching a valuation of 1 billion $ in 2022 vastly different from 1 billion $ in 2009?

miglen 4 years ago |

Excited to be part of the Bulgarian startup history!

Disclaimer: I work for the company and we are hiring across Europe: payhawk.com/careers

Congrats to Italy for Scalapay!

tamiral 4 years ago | |

chestito!!!

beebeepka 4 years ago |

This just shows how out of the loop I am. Never heard of this company.

Nursie 4 years ago |

Let’s hope this story ends better than London’s mid-10s unicorn, Powa Technologies…

pjmlp 4 years ago |

Really? What about Telerik?

Not paying attention it seems.

slavoingilizov 4 years ago | |

(I worked at Telerik until 2014). They were acquired by Progress software later that year for $262m, so no longer independent nor a unicorn. Still one of the biggest successes.

The Payhawk founders are ex-Telerik and Telerik has made a major influence on the Bulgarian startup ecosystem.

pjmlp 4 years ago | | |

That makes Payhawk not the first one, which was my point.

gostsamo 4 years ago | |

Telerik is no longer a bulgarian company. They were bought by Progress years ago.

Edit: grammar and spelling

pjmlp 4 years ago | | |

It looks like a sucessful acquisition to me, and its founders.