Pagos Raises $10M to Scale Platform Helping Companies Understand and Optimize Payments Performance

Pagos, a data and insight SaaS platform tailored to drive better performance and optimization of their customers’ existing payments infrastructure, today announced $10M in new Seed funding. The investment round was led by Underscore VC and Point72 Ventures alongside prominent investors and visionary executives including Amit Jhawar (former GM of Venmo), Bill Ready (President of Commerce, Payments & Next Billion Users at Google), Billy Chen (VP, Financial Partnerships at Finix), and Rich LaBarca (GM Dynamics 365 Customer Insights at Microsoft).

Payment processing is fundamental to customer relationships, revenue, and the bottom line, yet most companies do not have the tools, data, knowledge, or support to develop and execute an optimized payment strategy. This results in higher operating costs, lost revenue, and unnecessary friction, making execution of business strategy a lot harder than it should be.

The funding will be used for scaling Pagos’ data platform and API-driven microservices which can integrate with any payment stack. Services being offered in the short term include: 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. Network Tokenization and Account Updater services are planned for the near future.

CEO and co-founder Klas Bäck expressed that “This funding is invaluable to accomplishing our mission to deliver the payment intelligence infrastructure we’ve heard business after business request. Now it’s time to scale the team and empower companies to accelerate business growth, create long-term customer relationships, and be the creators of completely new business models.”

“At Underscore, we’re always excited to support founders that intimately understand their customer’s biggest pain points,” said Chris Gardner, Underscore VC Partner. “The Pagos team has decades of experience solving thorny payments challenges for some of the largest merchants in the world, and their API-based toolset for optimizing payment performance and decision making will be a game-changer for their customers.”

“As commerce becomes increasingly digitized, merchants’ payment stacks have become more complex and difficult to manage,” said Dave Matter, Operating Partner, Point72 Ventures. “Pagos is led by two of the most accomplished payments product experts in the business, and their relationships, domain expertise and first-hand experience with these pain points is incredibly valuable. We are thrilled to support their vision of building the first ‘payments intelligence’ platform that helps merchants of all sizes better understand and optimize their payments environment to increase revenue, reduce cost, and better serve their customers.”

Investor Billy Chen, VP of Financial Partnerships at Finix and former Director of Payments at Uber stated, “If Pagos was around when I was running payments at Uber it would have saved us so much time and resources. We spent too much time learning the ‘trade secrets’ of managing auth performance and payments costs when it should be standardized. Instead we could have focused on unique issues tied to Uber’s business.”

Customer behavior is changing and moving to a growing number of digital channels, requiring companies to change their infrastructure and the way they allow their customers to pay and interact with their goods and services. Companies shouldn’t have to build an in-house team of experts on all dimensions of the payments environment to thrive. Pagos’ platform will help companies better understand their payments environment, enable them to execute on strategies, and unlock new revenue more quickly than ever before without having to change the providers they work with.