Two former Netflix payments executives are wagering that the fragmented mess of European digital wallets and account-to-account payment systems isn't a problem to solve—it's a market to exploit.
Amsterdam-based Nopan announced a €7.2 million seed round on July 14, led by local venture firm Newion. The financing, which included follow-on backing from Crane Venture Partners and Seedcamp plus a handful of angels with merchant payments credentials who remain unnamed for privacy and strategic reasons, arrived after the startup secured a Payment Institution license from De Nederlandsche Bank. That regulatory green light, issued in the fourth quarter of 2025, granted Nopan the ability to operate across the EU just as Europe's payments landscape enters what some see as a long-overdue shakeup.
Konstantin Surkov and Nick Ryabov, who founded Nopan in 2024, both spent time on Netflix's Amsterdam-based payments team. Surkov also logged stints at Visa and Global Payments, according to Tech Funding News, though the company's official materials lean harder on the Netflix pedigree. Ryabov brings engineering chops from Microsoft and Netflix. The common thread: both worked inside large-scale digital commerce operations before launching their own venture.
Their pitch is deceptively narrow. Nopan doesn't want to replace a merchant's entire payment infrastructure. Instead, it aims to become what Surkov calls a "performance layer"—a specialized service provider that sits atop existing stacks and handles the bewildering array of European account and wallet methods that most merchants struggle to integrate individually.
A Unified API for Europe's Payment Patchwork
The list of systems Nopan connects reads like a tour of Europe's payment balkanization: Wero, the pan-European wallet launched by the European Payments Initiative; Poland's BLIK; Spain's Bizum; Italy's Satispay; Greece's IRIS Commerce. Each has its own technical requirements, mandate rules, and customer base. Each requires separate integration work.
Nopan's platform provides a single API that handles the full payment lifecycle—recurring payments via mandates, tokenization for account-to-account and wallet rails, and what the company describes as optimization for routing and performance. Technical documentation indicates support for both customer-initiated and merchant-initiated transactions, with scheme-specific compliance baked in. Whether that optimization engine delivers meaningful performance gains remains to be seen. Merchants, after all, already juggle complex payment stacks. Convincing them to add another layer—even a specialized one—requires demonstrating clear value.
Newion, which invests between €1 million and €10 million at seed and Series A stages, led the round. Partner Pieter Welten participated. Crane Venture Partners, known for early-stage infrastructure bets and hands-on go-to-market support, joined as a follow-on investor. Seedcamp, fresh off announcing its Fund VII in June, also came in.
The angel syndicate, unnamed for privacy and strategic reasons typical in such arrangements, brings deep merchant payments and fintech experience according to Nopan's press materials.
Momentum, or Just Good Timing?
The funding arrives on the heels of several partnership announcements that suggest Nopan is either building real momentum or simply benefiting from fortuitous timing in a shifting market.
In mid-June, Nopan became a Principal Member of the European Payments Initiative, positioning itself to help drive Wero adoption among enterprise merchants. Days earlier, on June 3, the company announced a partnership with Xsolla, the gaming payments provider, to accelerate account and wallet payment uptake among European game developers—a demographic that skews younger and more comfortable with non-card payment methods.
Then, on July 1—just two weeks before the funding announcement—Nopan partnered with DIAS to expand international access to IRIS Commerce, the Greek instant payment method that reportedly saw notable e-commerce growth in 2025 according to DIAS.
The company lists between 11 and 50 employees on LinkedIn at its Amsterdam headquarters on Jacob Obrechtstraat, though such figures often lag actual headcount and may not reflect current staffing levels.
Betting Against the Cards
The timing aligns with broader tremors in European payments infrastructure. Wero is gradually rolling out across member countries. Payconiq in Luxembourg and iDEAL in the Netherlands are both slated to migrate toward new infrastructure by 2027. Regulatory pressure for European payments sovereignty—a politically charged term that essentially means reducing dependence on American card networks—continues to build.
Nopan isn't disclosing valuation or the specific allocation of the €7.2 million beyond identifying lead and participating investors. What's evident is the strategic wedge: become the specialized connective tissue that makes Europe's fragmented account and wallet landscape manageable for enterprise merchants and payment service providers.
Whether that bet pays off hinges on factors largely beyond Nopan's control. Wero and other domestic methods need to gain meaningful traction against Visa and Mastercard—entrenched networks with decades of infrastructure, relationships, and consumer habit on their side. Merchants need to see performance improvements significant enough to justify the integration effort and ongoing operational complexity.
Perhaps more fundamentally, Surkov and Ryabov are wagering that fragmentation itself won't resolve. That Europe's patchwork of national payment systems will persist rather than consolidate. That merchants will prefer a unified API over eventually dealing with just one or two dominant players.
It's a contrarian thesis. Then again, Netflix alumni betting on non-obvious market structures have occasionally proven prescient.
The capital will fund expanded coverage of account and wallet payment methods, further development of Nopan's optimization engine, and commercial growth. The company says it will focus on enterprise merchants and payment service providers—the customers most likely to value abstraction from technical complexity.
For now, Nopan remains a small Amsterdam startup with a regulatory license, some high-profile partnerships, and a narrow thesis about the future of European payments. Whether Europe's payment chaos turns out to be an opportunity or simply chaos will become clearer as Wero's rollout progresses and merchants vote with their integration budgets.
