Payhawk Raises $3.35M For Virtual Corporate Cards

Payhawk, which makes next-generation paperless company cards, closed a 3-million-euro ($3.35 million) seed funding round primarily aided by Earlybird’s Digital East Fund, according to reports.

The money will go toward establishing a more robust presence in Germany after Payhawk recently opened an office in Berlin.

Other contributors included Berlin’s TinyVC, former European Visa Chief Commercial Officer Mark Antipof, and Sage Chief Strategy Officer Keith Robinson.

Payhawk’s platform lets business owners handle everything involved in payments. The system has machinations for putting funds into employee credit cards, dealing with invoice payment or collection, and working out transactions via the company software and generating the corresponding reports.

Payhawk aims to eliminate the divide between corporate cards and expense management, working on top of existing banks.

CEO and Founder Hristo Borisov cited his personal experience seeing too many systems in the past that required users to jump over hurdles and cut through red tape to achieve goals, with employees forced to spend their own money, manually track things that can be electronically traced now, and wait long lengths of time to be reimbursed.

Because of that, Borisov said he wanted to capitalize on paperless, digital trends.

Payhawk serves customers in 14 countries and has offices in Sofia and London. The third office was just recently opened in Berlin. Payhawk decided to relocate to Germany recently to take advantage of that country’s connections to the European Union Payment Services Directive, or PSD2, which will open the gates for more potential customers. The country’s laws allow paper receipts to be stored in digital archives in ways that work with tax laws.

Hendrik Drozdoff, senior finance manager at Finland’s influencer program Matchmade, said the ability to use multiple cards and wallets without having to top-up cards one-by-one was a huge draw in supporting Payhawk.

Paperless payments are increasing in scale every year. In Paris, riders have the option of buying reusable, contactless cards to access the metro. And in Russia, nearly half of expenses from this year’s first quarter were cashless.