Tapaya raises €1M pre-seed to kill the card reader

Payments infrastructure startup, Tapaya, has raised €1 million in a pre-seed round, led by Passion Capital, with co-lead participation from Depo Ventures, and follow-on investment from BADideas.fund.

In-person payments are largely dependent on dedicated hardware terminals, which creates additional costs and operational complexity for merchants. For companies looking to embed payment acceptance into their own systems, such as POS platforms, ERP software, or kiosks, the barriers are even higher. Certification processes can take up to 18–24 months, require multiple approvals, and cost a lot of money. The SoftPOS market reached €336 million globally in 2024 and is forecast to grow at 23% annually to €1.14 billion by 2030. In Europe, contactless card payments grew 12% in the first half of 2025, according to the European Central Bank, yet existing infrastructure struggles to support newer payment methods and digital wallets, which are expected to exceed €13.5 trillion in transaction value by 2028.

Tapaya is addressing this by abstracting compliance, certification, and processor integrations into a single software layer. This enables developers to integrate payment acceptance across Android, iOS, and other commercial devices, including tablets, kiosks, and enterprise systems, turning standard commercial devices into a payment terminal, effectively removing the need for dedicated terminals. By eliminating the need to interact with processors or navigate regulatory frameworks, Tapaya reduces integration timelines from months, or even years, to days. The platform connects to multiple processors, banks, and card schemes, giving partners flexibility while enabling merchants to manage payments within their existing systems.

Laura Ďorďová, Co-Founder and CEO of Tapaya, said: “We want accepting payments to be as simple as turning on a light. For decades, it has meant relying on a piece of hardware, buying it, carrying it, connecting it, and reconciling it separately. Merchants are tired of that complexity. We’ve seen firsthand how much time and cost goes into enabling something as simple as that. While the rest of commerce has moved into software, payments have remained stuck in hardware. Tapaya removes that friction by packaging the entire stack into a single SDK, so developers can integrate payments as easily as any other feature.

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The system is designed to meet evolving security standards introduced by the global PCI Security Standards Council, the global body that governs how card payments are processed and protected. Until 2022, accepting card payments legally required certified hardware. A new global security framework, PCI MPoC, changed that, making secure card acceptance possible on any commercial device for the first time. By consolidating compliance and infrastructure into a single integration, Tapaya allows software platforms and financial institutions to offer in-person payments without building their own certification stack.