FF News Logo
Monday, February 23, 2026
FFNews x MoneyLIVE

Payhawk Becomes First Ever Bulgarian Unicorn After Raising $100M

Payhawk, the payment and expense solution with offices in London, Sofia, Berlin, and Barcelona, has raised an additional $100m to extend its Series B round to $215m. The Series B extension means that the company hits a valuation of $1bn, making Payhawk the first ever Bulgarian company to achieve unicorn status. The company plans to become a catalyst for the Bulgarian startup ecosystem, and continue to attract and retain the top 1% of talent in the market.

Lightspeed Venture Partners — a leading global venture capital firm with over $10.5bn under management and prior investments in companies like Affirm, Grafana, Faire, FTX, Personio, Snap, and others — leads the funding extension, with Sprints Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, HubSpot Ventures and Jigsaw VC also joining the round.

The additional funding comes only three months after Payhawk announced the initial tranche of Series B funding in November 2021 of $115m, and less than a year after its $20m Series A round in April 2021. With the extra funds, Payhawk now has the financial clout required to aggressively expand its presence in the mid-size enterprise market and continue its ambitious global expansion plans.

Currently, finance teams still do a significant amount of manual work due to multiple disconnected tools for cards, payments, invoices, and expense management. Payhawk reduces this by combining those key elements in a single platform. The company also provides an industry-first 3% cashback on card payments up to the full subscription amount, enabling customers to drive their subscription costs to zero, while benefiting from enterprise-grade software.

Payhawk emerges as the leading platform for large SMEs and enterprise customers, especially those with a multinational footprint. The company serves businesses in 30 countries across a variety of industries, currencies and payment methods.

The fresh capital will be used to further grow Payhawk’s product team by adding 60 additional senior software engineers in Sofia from the top 1% of the market. This is with the aim of meeting growing customer demand for new features like mileage tracking and per diem, in light of the incremental return of business travel.e. Other existing features for enterprise customers will be extended too, including Oracle Netsuite integration, Subscription Management and Budgets.

Building on the momentum from the first influx of Series B capital, Payhawk is set to open offices in Amsterdam and Paris in March, and in New York in September. The company’s headcount is also set to triple from 100 to more than 300 by the end of this year, with the extra funds set to fuel a renewed sales and marketing push for further market expansion.

Companies In This Post

  1. New Partnership Introduces First-of-its-Kind Model To Democratise Olympic Sailing Read more
  2. Bluefin and Basis Theory Partner to Enable Unified Tokenization Across Digital and In-Person Payments Read more
  3. Invest Bank and AUTON8 Build Partnership to Drive Digital Resilience and Banking Agility Read more
  4. ING’s AI Roadmap: Platform, People, and Agentic AI Read more
  5. UK-fintech Provided Over £17.5m in Emergency Wage Advances to More Than 55,000 Employees in the Last Year Read more
Future Identity Finance x FFNews