Why We Continued to Invest in Silverflow
By Picus Capital, Florian Reichert - Partner & MD
We first met Silverflow when the company was just getting started — a small team out of Amsterdam with an audacious ambition: to rebuild the backbone of global card payments from scratch. What immediately caught our attention was not the pitch deck, but the founders. Anne Willem de Vries and Robert Kraal had spent years at Adyen at exactly the right time — Robert as EVP Global Acquiring & Processing and later COO, Anne Willem focused on card acquiring and processing — working at the heart of the infrastructure they now set out to replace, complemented by Paul Buying bringing the necessary technical expertise to the team. That kind of founder-problem fit, in a market this complex and trust-based, is rare.
While we got in touch with the team a bit too late to participate in their first seed round which they were already closing at the time, we stayed close and came on board in a subsequent round. Today, we are thrilled to announce that we have led Silverflow’s $40 million Series B, making it one of our most significant follow-on investments to date and a clear expression of Picus Capital’s strategy of partnering with exceptional companies early and backing them with real conviction as they scale.
The problem: 40 years of technical debt in a $100bn+ market
To understand why we are so excited about Silverflow, you need to understand what acquiring processing actually is — and why it has barely changed in four decades.
Every time a card is used to make a payment, an acquiring processor sits at the center of the transaction. It connects the merchant bank to the card networks (Visa, Mastercard etc.), orchestrates authorization, manages settlement, and handles the flood of data that flows through the system. It is mission-critical infrastructure — the plumbing beneath the entire card-payments economy.
The problem is that this plumbing was built in the 1970s and 80s. The largest processors in the world — Fiserv, FIS, Global Payments — are running legacy technology stacks that predate the internet. For their customers, this means painful and expensive integrations, significant downtime, months-long implementation cycles for new features, opaque fee structures, sub-par performance (conversion, risk, cost) due to lack of data and little control over the data flowing through their own payments stack.
While the merchant and customer-facing “front end” of payments has been continuously transformed by payment service providers over the past decade, the back end has not. While only accounting for around 5% of the market, global tech-savvy full-stack acquirers like Adyen and Stripe have invested heavily and are putting significant competitive pressure on payment companies and banks. Silverflow is fixing that for the remaining 95% of the market.
What Silverflow has built
Silverflow has rebuilt acquiring processing as a cloud-native, API-first platform. Where legacy processors require bespoke integrations and one-off engineering projects to access card network innovations, Silverflow offers a single, modern API — a direct connection to Visa, Mastercard and other networks that automatically keeps pace with the schemes’ latest features: network tokenization, 3D-Secure 2.2, dispute management, direct-to-card payouts etc.
The result is measurable and concrete. Silverflow customers benefit from up to 25bps in margin improvement through transaction-level cost data, save up to 12 months on initial acquirer setup and extensions, and reduce total cost of operations by around 20% through the platform’s high degree of automation. These are not theoretical benefits — they show up directly in customers P&Ls.
Beyond cost, Silverflow delivers far greater transparency into transaction-level data — including interchange breakdown and fraud signals that legacy processors simply do not surface — and dramatically faster time-to-market for new payment features.
We heard customers describe the experience of switching to Silverflow as disorienting in the best way. As Anne Willem has said publicly: “Our biggest challenge has been getting customers to believe this technology is real. They often tell us it’s too good to be true.”
This reaction — skepticism followed by conversion — is one of the most compelling signals we have seen in any investment. It speaks to a product that genuinely leapfrogs the status quo rather than incrementally improving it. The fact that they reached $10bn in processed volume faster than the darlings of the payments industry (Stripe and Adyen) further underscores the exceptional product the team is building.
Why we doubled down
When we made our initial investment, we already had high conviction in the team and the technology. What the intervening period has done is systematically provide more proof points for us that Silverflow can become a truly category-defining company.
1️⃣ The customer base speaks for itself
Silverflow serves three distinct but equally demanding customer segments: payment companies looking to compete with best-in-class full-stack acquirers, acquiring banks seeking to win customers with modern infrastructure, and large commerce platforms that want direct control over their payments stack. Winning across all three segments, against deeply entrenched legacy and tech-savvy vendors, is a strong proof point of product breadth and maturity.
The type of customer logos Silverflow could acquire at the early stage of the business (incl. Deutsche Bank, Bolt and others that are not public) for one of the most crucial parts of their infrastructure clearly stands out.
2️⃣ The voice of customers confirmed what we hoped to hear
As part of our diligence for this round, we conducted extensive customer calls with live customers. The feedback was striking in its consistency. Every customer we spoke to confirmed superior product quality, praised the team’s depth of expertise and responsiveness, and expressed strong intent to deepen the relationship and move more volume over time.
This kind of uniform, enthusiastic customer feedback — from sophisticated B2B buyers in a sector not known for its expressiveness — is genuinely unusual.
3️⃣ The business model has exceptional structural properties
Acquiring processing is deeply embedded infrastructure. Switching costs are enormous — not because of contractual lock-in, but because of the technical depth of integration and the operational risk involved in moving core payment flows. Once a customer is live on Silverflow, they stay. This makes every customer win cumulative, and it means the revenue base is both sticky and predictable.
Layered on top of this stickiness is a highly attractive margin profile. Because Silverflow is purely a technology/data layer — it is not in the money flow and takes no underwriting risk — it can operate at very high gross margins. Given their next-generation technology infrastructure, their margin profile is also superior to their competitors.
4️⃣ The market allows for a truly category-defining outcome
Legacy processors are not standing still, but they are constrained by decades of technical debt, their own installed base, and organizational cultures not built for the pace of change that cloud-native companies operate at. The market is enormous — card transaction volumes continue to grow globally at a strong compounding rate — and the major players generate revenues that dwarf what Silverflow is targeting in the near term.
Crucially, there is essentially no other company attempting what Silverflow is doing, combining unique founder-problem fit with strong commercial traction. The major full-stack acquirers like Adyen and Stripe have their own captive processing but are fundamentally geared towards merchants and platforms, not towards enabling third-party acquirers and PSPs. Silverflow occupies a lane that is genuinely uncontested while also offering a superior product for very large platforms. This is underlined by Silverflow reaching $10bn in processed volume faster than the likes of Stripe and Adyen.
In the current age of agentic commerce and stablecoins we of course had to model out what role the card networks will keep on playing. In our view they will clearly remain at the core of financial transactions as their key pillars around network, trust and safety will remain as unique as before. While many of them are already investing heavily to increase operational efficiency — for example by leveraging stablecoins — the technology/data layer for network participants to communicate remains at the core of every transaction.
Hence, we believe that there is abundant room for a best-in-class challenger that is rebuilding the foundational layer of a large part of the global financial system.
5️⃣ The team has continued to exceed expectations
The founders have not just built a product — they have built a company. The leadership team they have assembled is truly unique, with alumni of Adyen, Mastercard and Airwallex in key commercial and technical roles. Retention has been exceptional. The culture they have built is reflected in the consistent, high-quality execution we have observed across every dimension of the business.
The team combines deep technical and commercial expertise with a very particular combination of ambition and pragmatism. They know their market better than almost anyone, and they are building with the patience and discipline that infrastructure companies require.
What this round enables
The Series B will allow Silverflow to accelerate on multiple fronts: deepening its presence in Europe, expanding in North America, and pushing further into Southeast Asia and Latin America. It will also support continued investment in the acquiring bank partner network — critical to offering the localized coverage that large global customers require — and in the product roadmap, including offline POS processing and eventual expansion into adjacent processing capabilities.
More than anything, it gives Silverflow the runway and the credibility to pursue the largest opportunities in their pipeline: global financial institutions and platforms for whom Silverflow is not just a vendor, but a strategic infrastructure partner.
The long view
At Picus Capital, we are convinced that the most important technology companies are often not the ones that are easiest to understand, and that the best investments come from the patience to build deep relationships with exceptional founders over time and the conviction to back them seriously when the moment is right.
Silverflow is exactly this kind of company. It is not building a feature or a workflow tool. It is rebuilding a foundational layer of the global financial system — with technology that is genuinely a generation ahead of the status quo.
We are proud to be their lead investor in this round, and we are looking forward to building something exceptional together with Anne Willem, Robert, Paul, and the entire Silverflow team.
Florian Reichert, Partner & MD at Picus Capital
