The front end of payments has been rebuilt several times over. Adyen, Stripe and their peers made accepting a card straightforward for merchants, and the checkout experience today bears no resemblance to the one from a decade ago. What almost nobody touched was the layer underneath — the processing infrastructure that actually talks to Visa and Mastercard, much of it running on technology approaching forty years old, wrapped in successive generations of middleware by companies that inherited rather than designed it.
Anne Willem de Vries and Robert Kraal had spent years looking at that problem from the inside. De Vries worked on card acquiring and processing at Adyen; Kraal was Adyen's COO and EVP of global card acquiring and processing. In 2019 they founded Silverflow in Amsterdam with Paul Buying, who had built and sold the translation startup Livewords, and spent more than two years building before launching the platform in 2021. The proposition is a single API connecting directly to the card networks, cloud-native from the first line of code, with no legacy estate to maintain: 3D Secure, network tokenisation, direct-to-card payouts, enriched scheme data and a dispute management portal, delivered to acquirers, PSPs, payment facilitators and large merchants rather than to end consumers.
The customer list is the strongest evidence that the approach works at the scale it was designed for. Deutsche Bank, the mobility platform Bolt and the Dutch payment provider Buckaroo all run on Silverflow, and the platform processes close to 1.75 million transactions a day, approaching a billion a year. In March 2026 the company raised €37 million in a Series B led by Munich-based Picus Capital, with Rabo Investments joining existing backers Inkef, Global PayTech Ventures, Crane Venture Partners and Coatue — taking total funding past €70 million and funding an expansion of headcount from roughly 85 toward 120. The stated priorities are North America and Southeast Asia, plus support for additional card networks including China UnionPay and JCB.
The strategic bet is straightforward and slow to pay off: that processors and acquirers will eventually replace backend infrastructure the way banks are replacing core banking systems, and that when they do they will choose a platform built for the purpose rather than another layer on top of what exists. It is the same argument Thought Machine and Mambu make about core banking, applied to card processing, and it faces the same obstacle — incumbents like FIS and Elavon are deeply entrenched, migrations are risky, and nobody switches processing infrastructure on a whim. Silverflow's answer is to be demonstrably better at the things that cost acquirers money: authorisation rates, data richness, dispute handling and the speed at which a new feature can reach production.