Former Netflix Payments Leaders Raise €7.2M to Fix Europe’s Wallets

Nopan, a payments startup built by two former Netflix executives, has raised €7.2 million to make European bank and wallet payments as reliable as a card swipe. The Amsterdam-based company closed its newest round with Newion in the lead and existing backers Crane and Seedcamp following on, alongside a group of fintech-focused angel investors.

Cards took decades to become invisible, dependable infrastructure. Nopan is wagering that Europe’s patchwork of bank and wallet schemes, from Wero to BLIK, can close that reliability gap fast enough to keep merchants from drifting back to cards that already work everywhere.

A Netflix Playbook Aimed at European Wallets

Konstantin Surkov and Nick Ryabov, Nopan’s co-founders, spent years running payments inside Netflix before concluding that the hardest problems in the industry are not the ones a streaming giant runs into. Launching a new payment method is the easy part. Keeping it working across dozens of banks, devices and customer habits is where most projects stall.

That gap became the premise for Nopan, which the pair founded to bring a merchant’s-eye view to a market still largely built around cards. “The real challenge is making it perform reliably across banks, customer behaviours, operational processes and, where relevant, across markets,” Surkov said. “Nopan was created to solve exactly that challenge.”

Surkov is Nopan’s chief executive. Ryabov carries the same merchant-side background, the two having spent years optimising checkout performance together before striking out on their own.

That vantage point shapes how Nopan pitches itself, as the operational layer that keeps a payment method performing well after the initial launch work is done.

Cards Set the Bar That Wallets Still Chase

Card networks spent decades building routing, fraud tools and bank relationships that make a tap at checkout feel automatic. Account and wallet payments, transfers that move straight from a shopper’s bank account or e-wallet instead of through a card network, are catching up in popularity fast, just not yet in plumbing.

Much of the gap between a wallet merchants love and one they quietly drop comes down to authorisation rates, the share of attempted payments that clear without a hiccup. Cards solved that problem market by market over thirty years. Wallets are trying to solve it continent-wide in a fraction of the time.

Pan-European initiatives such as Wero, the joint bank-backed wallet rolling out across the eurozone, are pushing adoption higher, alongside long-established local schemes like Bizum in Spain and BLIK in Poland. Flagship Advisory Partners has tracked digital wallets becoming the fastest-growing checkout method in European e-commerce, even as the infrastructure underneath struggles to keep pace.

• 186 billion account-to-account transactions could move annually across the market by 2029, up from an estimated 60 billion in 2024, according to industry trackers.
• 28% is the rough annual growth rate some market forecasts assign to the broader open banking-powered payments opportunity through the early 2030s.
• Five is roughly how many separate national and pan-European wallet schemes a single European merchant may need to support to reach every major market, before cards even enter the picture.

None of that growth guarantees any single infrastructure vendor wins the category. It just means the category is now big enough to fight over.

Inside the €7.2 Million Round

The €7.2 million figure is cumulative. It combines a new round led by early-stage investor Newion with follow-on capital from earlier backers Crane and Seedcamp, plus a group of angel investors with merchant payments and fintech backgrounds.

• Newion is leading this round and focuses on early-stage European software and fintech investments.
• Crane returned as a follow-on investor after backing Nopan earlier.
• Seedcamp also followed on; the firm closed its own €279 million fund in June to back early-stage European startups.
• A group of angel investors with merchant-side payments experience rounded out the round.

Pieter Welten, a partner at Newion, said the firm sees a structural opening in the market.

“Account and wallet payments represent a major opportunity, but the infrastructure required to make them perform at scale is still emerging,” he said. “With its deep merchant-side payments experience and highly focused technology platform, we believe Nopan is uniquely positioned to become a category leader in this next phase of payments.”

The raise lands amid a busy stretch for European tech financing broadly. One recent week alone produced €2.8 billion across fusion, cloud and bank-debt deals on the continent, a reminder of how much capital is still chasing infrastructure bets even in a choosier funding climate.

Five Payment Schemes, One Dutch Licence

Nopan received its licence from De Nederlandsche Bank (DNB, the Dutch central bank) in the fourth quarter of 2025, giving it regulatory standing to operate as a licensed payment institution in its own right.

It followed that with Principal Member status inside the European Payments Initiative (EPI, the bank consortium behind Wero), a move Nopan says will accelerate Wero acceptance among enterprise merchants.

Each scheme carries its own rules, bank connections and fraud behaviour, the operational complexity Nopan says it exists to absorb on a merchant’s behalf.

Why Don’t Europe’s Wallets Work Together Yet?

Because each wallet grew out of a separate national banking system with its own rules, and no regulator has forced them to speak the same language. Wero, Vipps, BLIK, Bizum, Satispay and IRIS all move money straight from a bank account or wallet balance, but a merchant supporting one gets no guarantee the others behave the same way.

Analysts covering the sector call interoperability the market’s most stubborn unresolved problem. There is currently no interoperability between wallets such as Vipps and Wero, forcing merchants to support multiple systems in parallel.

Security expectations differ by market too. A fraud pattern common in one country can look like a false positive in another, and a wallet that gets flagged too often loses merchant trust fast. Add anti-money laundering rules that vary market by market, and the “easy” part of accepting a wallet turns out to be the smallest piece of the job.

This is the gap Nopan charges merchants and payment service providers to close. It is also the clearest risk to the pitch: a bigger card network or a well-capitalised rival could build the same optimisation layer first.

The Next Test for Nopan’s Category Bet

The new capital is earmarked for three things: broader coverage of account and wallet methods across Europe, deeper optimisation tooling, and a bigger commercial team to court digital businesses and fintechs directly.

Nopan’s wager fits a broader pattern this year, as investors keep funding narrow, infrastructure-focused bets on categories everyone agrees will grow but nobody has fully wired together.

Sovereign data intelligence firm StirlingX brought on a former GCHQ director as chair while closing its own $20 million Series A earlier this year. It is a similar bet: deep domain expertise beating a faster-moving generalist.

The Payments Association points to a broader shift underway in how Europeans check out online, with wallets reshaping habits built over decades around plastic cards.

Nopan is live with initial customers today. The company says its merchant-native pedigree, built by people who once sat on the merchant side of the table, separates its pitch from vendors coming out of the banking side.

Enterprise merchants and payment service providers across Europe are already asking for access, the contracts that will decide how far this bet actually travels.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Does Nopan Actually Do?

Nopan sells an infrastructure and optimisation layer that plugs in alongside a merchant’s existing payment setup. It focuses on making account and wallet payments convert more reliably, with customers spanning digital businesses and the payment service providers that process on their behalf.

What Is Wero?

Wero is the pan-European digital wallet built by a consortium of major banks under the European Payments Initiative, letting shoppers pay straight from a bank account at checkout. Nopan holds Principal Member status within that initiative specifically to help enterprise merchants accept Wero at scale.

How Much Money Has Nopan Raised in Total?

Nopan has raised €7.2 million to date. That total includes this newest round led by Newion, disclosed in July 2026, plus earlier follow-on capital from existing backers Crane and Seedcamp and a group of angel investors.

Which Payment Methods Does Nopan Support?

Nopan currently supports Wero, BLIK in Poland, Bizum in Spain, Satispay in Italy and IRIS in Greece. The company says broader European coverage is planned as it deploys its new funding over the coming months.

Is Nopan a Payment Service Provider?

No. Nopan positions itself as infrastructure that works alongside a merchant’s payment service provider, concentrating specifically on account and wallet payment performance. It holds its own licence from the Dutch central bank (DNB), secured in the fourth quarter of 2025.