Prague-based fintech startup Tapaya is accelerating its mission to eliminate in-store payment hardware. The startup, founded in July 2025, has raised a €1 million pre-seed round led by Passion Capital (UK) with participation from Depo Ventures and follow-on investment from BADideas.fund. Tapaya’s platform lets any smartphone, tablet, or existing POS device accept card and digital wallet payments via a drop-in SoftPOS SDK. According to CEO Laura Ďorďová, the goal is to make “accepting payments…as simple as turning on a light”, moving commerce fully into software.
From founders to frictionless payments:
Tapaya was created by co-founders Laura Ďorďová, Roman Kuchařík, and Petr Zahradník, three seasoned payments engineers who previously built and certified point-of-sale products together. They quickly recognized the pain points merchants face: dedicated payment terminals are costly, slow to certify, and complex to manage. The advent of the PCI MPoC standard in 2022 made it possible to accept secure card payments on consumer devices, and Tapaya set out to capitalize on that change. By wrapping compliance, processor connections, and security into one SDK, Tapaya enables software teams (POS providers, delivery apps, ERP systems, etc.) to embed in-person payments without hardware. “Tapaya removes that friction by packaging the entire stack into a single SDK, so developers can integrate payments as easily as any other feature,” Ďorďová explains.
Software-defined in-store payments:
Tapaya’s core product is an Accept SDK and accompanying platform. Developers drop the SDK into their iOS or Android apps, which instantly turns the device into a certified payment terminal. The SDK is multi-platform (mobile and web) and supports all major payment methods – credit/debit cards, NFC (Tap to Phone), and digital wallets like Apple Pay and Google Pay. A built-in API dashboard provides real-time analytics, transaction management, and fee configuration. Notably, integration is very fast: Tapaya advertises “30 minutes to your first transaction” with no in-depth payments knowledge required. This speed is possible because Tapaya’s infrastructure already handles PCI compliance and acquirer certification: partners simply sign up on Tapaya’s platform, obtain API keys, and embed the SDK. In effect, any smartphone or tablet, already in the merchant’s pocket becomes a fully compliant point-of-sale.
Market traction and recognition:
Despite its youth, Tapaya has already gained significant momentum. Within months of launch the company had multiple integrations underway in the Czech Republic and early partnerships across Central and Eastern Europe. The fintech community has taken notice: Tapaya won the Digital category at Slovakia’s Startup Awards 2025, and was selected for the prestigious Mastercard Lighthouse FINITIV accelerator in Spring 2026. Investor enthusiasm is high: Michal Ciffra of Depo Ventures notes that Tapaya is tackling a “genuinely underserved gap” in payments and already replacing incumbent SDKs on live deployments. In-person transactions are estimated to be six times larger than online volume, yet software payment infrastructure has lagged behind. As Passion Capital’s Will Orde points out, “The team has already navigated the hardest parts of payments certification…Tapaya is changing the access equation for an entire layer of the market”.
Financing and future roadmap:
The €1M raise will be used to complete Tapaya’s own PCI MPoC certification and develop more of its proprietary infrastructure, reducing dependence on third-party tools. The company’s long-term roadmap includes adding more payment rails (such as A2A Open Banking payments) and supporting emerging technologies like “agentic” payment triggers and the upcoming digital euro. Geographically, Tapaya plans to expand beyond its Slovak and Czech roots into other European markets where SoftPOS demand is growing. Ďorďová emphasizes their multi-country strategy: winning at SASK has already opened doors across CEE, and their inclusion in Mastercard’s program will connect Tapaya with major Nordic and Baltic banks.
The vision ahead:
As Tapaya’s lead engineer and co-founder says, the startup is positioning itself as the “invisible engine” behind the next generation of digital commerce. By erasing the need for physical terminals, Tapaya envisions a world where in-person payments are as seamless and familiar as any app feature. Combining deep fintech expertise with a developer-first platform, the company aims to make seamless payments a standard feature of all business apps. With early funding, high-profile backing, and a growing customer pipeline, Tapaya is poised to be a key enabler of the software-defined point-of-sale era building the “financial plumbing” that lets businesses focus on building products, not payment hardware.
