Silverflow, a Dutch fintech startup that will launch early next year, has announced a €2.6 million seed funding round led by UK-based Crane Venture Partners. Other backers include INKEF Capital and angel investors from Pay.On, First Data, Booking.com and Adyen. With this seed round, Silverflow has now raised a total of €3 million.

The business’ aim is to build a cloud platform for global payment processing that connects directly with the card networks. The platform is designed for payment service processors (PSPs), acquirers and global top-market merchants that see between €500 million and €10 billion in annual transactions. As of now, such customers need to manage a complex network of acquirers across markets and maintain dozens of bank and card network connections, says Silverflow.

“Today’s card payment infrastructure is based on 30 to 40-year-old technology that’s still in use across the global payment landscape,” said CEO Anne-Willem de Vries. “We founded Silverflow with the belief that the payments technology stack needs an upgrade.”

Indeed, the startup was founded by long-time veterans of the online payments industry, de Vries (who was focused on card acquiring and processing at Adyen) and CBDO Robert Kraal (former Adyen COO and EVP global card acquiring & processing of Adyen), as well as CTO Paul Buying (founder of acquired translation startup Livewords).

So far it’s a team of five employees based in Amsterdam. The new seed funding round will enable Silverflow to double its headcount by the end of 2020, adding new developers and a commercial director.

Photo: Founders Robert Kraal, Paul Buying and Anne-Willem de Vries