Acquiring startup ecosystem
We track 3 organisations in this sector across 3+ countries.
Showing 3 of 3Acquiring
Acquiring results
Barion
Barion is a Budapest-based licensed e-money institution and payment processor that offers online card acquiring, wallet-based payments, and embedded-payment APIs for e-commerce merchants, marketplaces, and software platforms in the CEE region. Regulated by the Hungarian central bank (MNB) and passported across the EU under its e-money license, Barion is one of the few independent merchant-acquiring alternatives to Stripe, Adyen, and the big international PSPs for merchants that specifically want a Hungarian-language, locally supported, lower-fee payment rail. The company has been growing steadily into neighboring markets and into B2B verticals like iGaming and SaaS, and serves as the local reference for fintech founders who want to understand how small EU markets can build their own regulated payment infrastructure rather than reselling others'.
iyzico
iyzico is an Istanbul-founded payment processor and merchant-acquiring platform that became Turkey's most visible fintech exit when it was acquired by Naspers-owned PayU in 2019 for around USD 165 million, at the time one of the largest fintech deals in Turkish history. Founded in 2013 by Barbaros Özbugutu and Tahsin Isin, iyzico built a developer-friendly API stack for accepting card payments, recurring billing, marketplace split payments, and fraud detection in the Turkish market, and layered a 'buy now, pay later' product on top that became a default installment option for thousands of Turkish e-commerce merchants. Even inside PayU, iyzico continues to operate as the Turkish merchant payments brand and has expanded into additional financial services, making it a canonical reference for how a CEE/MENA fintech can convert a tough local regulatory environment into a defensible commercial wedge.
Viva Wallet
Viva Wallet is an Athens-based neobank and acquiring bank that built Europe's first fully cloud-native card-acquiring platform, running on Microsoft Azure and designed from day one for SoftPOS and ISO-independent merchant onboarding. The company serves small and medium merchants across 24 European countries with Android-based payment terminals, e-commerce gateways, IBAN accounts, instant settlement, and merchant cash advance products, and crossed 500,000 merchants before the JPMorgan Chase acquisition closed. JPMorgan bought a majority stake in 2022 valuing Viva Wallet at around USD 2 billion, specifically to use its cloud-native acquiring stack as the base for Chase's own European merchant-services expansion — one of the largest strategic tech acquisitions ever done out of Greece. Founded by Haris Karonis, Viva is today the anchor of the Athenian fintech cluster and proof that payments infrastructure of global quality can be built outside of London, Amsterdam, and Stockholm.
