Paymove raises 2.1 million euros for offline payments and AI agents

The Polish fintech Paymove has closed a financing round of 2.12 million euros. The round was led by 4growth VC. Kogito Ventures and several business angels also participated. The fresh capital is intended to finance both the expansion into Western European markets and the development of a payment infrastructure for autonomous AI agents.

Digitization of an offline market worth billions

While the e-commerce market has long been digitalized, many offline payments are still made using cost-intensive and inflexible infrastructure. The start-up, founded in 2023, replaces traditional parking machines, cash register systems and payment terminals with QR code-based payment processes. Users can pay bills, parking tickets, public transport tickets or administrative fees without downloading an app or creating an account.

According to the company, the European market for offline payments is worth around 39.5 billion euros. The segment of unattended payment systems alone, such as for parking or ticketing, is estimated at around 9.5 billion euros.

Infrastructure for autonomous AI agents

A significant proportion of the funding will go towards the development of a new generation of products. Paymove is currently developing a payment infrastructure for autonomous AI agents that will be able to initiate transactions independently in the future.

CEO Piotr Mazur sees this as the company's next development step. The aim is to build a comprehensive payment-as-a-service platform that combines three areas: offline payments, e-commerce and mobile payments and, in future, AI-controlled agent payments.

The corresponding infrastructure is to be presented later this year.

Expansion into Spain, Portugal and Italy

Paymove is currently active in more than 2,000 locations in Poland. According to the company, it reaches over 600,000 users and processes several hundred thousand transactions a year.

The new capital will now be used to drive international expansion. Concrete contract negotiations are already underway in Spain, Portugal and Italy.

Investors see great potential

For lead investor 4growth VC, the opportunity lies above all in the offline world, which has been insufficiently digitized to date. While competition in e-commerce payment transactions is increasingly saturated, the digitalization of offline processes opens up considerable growth opportunities.

Additional tailwind could be provided by regulatory developments such as the Europe-wide introduction of SEPA Instant Payments, which should make real-time transfers the standard in future.

Paymove was founded in 2023 by Piotr Mazur, Kamil Kuper and Tomasz Gęsior. The company is developing a digital payment infrastructure for offline retail and unattended payment scenarios. Instead of traditional terminals, the start-up relies on QR code-based payment processes that work without app installation or registration.