kevin. was, for a period, the company most often named as Lithuania's next unicorn. Founded in Vilnius in 2018, it built account-to-account payment infrastructure on PSD2 with an unusually ambitious goal: not just online bank payments, but in-store A2A payments through existing card terminals, letting merchants bypass card network fees entirely. The pitch was direct competition with Visa and Mastercard on their own ground, and it attracted roughly $75-79 million in venture funding along with early traction in the Baltics, Poland, the Netherlands and Portugal.
It did not work. The company's difficulties became public in July 2024, when the Bank of Lithuania appointed a temporary representative to oversee its activities and barred it from taking on new customers, citing audited annual accounts almost four months overdue, repeated deadline extensions, failure to provide auditors with necessary information, non-compliance with capital adequacy requirements, and inadequate internal control. Headcount had already collapsed from 113 to 22 over the preceding year, the Lithuanian Labour Inspectorate received dozens of employee complaints over unpaid salaries, and the company had accumulated social security tax debts. kevin. filed for bankruptcy in September 2024, and a Vilnius court opened bankruptcy proceedings. In 2026 the Bank of Lithuania formally revoked the payment institution licence of Kevin EU, UAB after assessing the company's ability to continue operations.
The post-mortem is instructive for the category rather than unique to the company. kevin.'s technology was real and its thesis — that card fees are a tax on small transactions that open banking could remove — remains the thesis behind Token.io, Trustly and Brite Payments. What it could not solve was the gap between venture funding and a sustainable business model: A2A checkout flows involved more steps than tapping a card, conversion suffered accordingly, and merchant savings were not enough to overcome consumer habit at the scale required. The failure is one of the clearest European examples of a well-funded fintech running out of runway before its market arrived.
kevin. is retained in this database as a record. It is not operational.