Sector:
Fintech
Country:
Luxembourg / Bulgaria
Year
2026
Short Description
Paypercut is a payments platform built for online merchants across Central and Eastern Europe. It brings together card payments, local payment methods, buy now pay later, multi-currency settlement, and reconciliation into a single integration, replacing the fragmented stack that merchants in the region have had to piece together themselves.
Founders
Stoil Vasilev
,
Co-founder & CEO
Gareth Walsh
,
Co-founder
Emil Savov
,
Co-founder
Why we invested
Payments infrastructure in Central and Eastern Europe is fragmented in a way that has no good excuse. Merchants expanding across the region have had to stitch together separate PSPs, BNPL providers, local payment methods, and settlement rails country by country, because no one credible enough has bothered to fix it. Paypercut turns that complexity into a single integration layer, handling routing, reconciliation, and local checkout coverage across markets that the industry has written off as too complicated. Stoil, Gareth, and Emil spent a combined two decades at SumUp watching this problem from the inside. They know exactly where the infrastructure breaks down and what it takes to replace it. Founder-market fit this strong in a market this underserved is precisely the kind of opportunity we back at BlackWood.
Founder Story
Stoil Vasilev
,
Co-founder & CEO
Stoil grew up in Bulgaria with finance on his mind from the age of ten, when he read Dreiser's Titan and decided that was the world he wanted. He got there through persistence: the best university in Bulgaria for finance, a cold email to a Harvard-educated bank CEO that took nine months to get a response, and two unpaid weeks to earn a job offer. That job turned out to be the largest commercial real estate investment fund in Central and Eastern Europe. He was in his early twenties and had just stumbled into the room he had been trying to reach his whole life.
A stint running a financial leasing business across Romania and Macedonia through the financial crisis followed. He kept the company alive when almost nothing around it survived, but left with more questions than answers about what he actually wanted to build. Then Daniel Kniaz called and asked him to join SumUp. Stoil knew nothing about payments. He joined anyway, became Daniel's right hand on the financial side, and spent the next nine and a half years leading every one of the company's ten acquisitions and raising over three billion dollars, running deals with Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan from an office in Sofia, which never stopped surprising people on the other end of the call.
He left in the summer of 2024. By October he was at a Pearl Jam concert in Ireland with Gareth Walsh, SumUp's former global head of compliance, and the conversation turned to what they should build together. They had both spent years inside one of Europe's most ambitious fintech companies watching CEE get treated as a footnote. Too fragmented. Too many currencies. Too complicated to bother with properly. They knew that was wrong, and they knew exactly what it would take to fix it.
Paypercut gives online merchants across Central and Eastern Europe a single integration to accept card payments, local payment methods, and buy now pay later, with multi-currency settlement built in. Stoil, Gareth, and co-founder Emil Savov are building the payments infrastructure the region has always deserved but never had.
Stoil grew up in Bulgaria with finance on his mind from the age of ten, when he read Dreiser's Titan and decided that was the world he wanted. He got there through persistence: the best university in Bulgaria for finance, a cold email to a Harvard-educated bank CEO that took nine months to get a response, and two unpaid weeks to earn a job offer. That job turned out to be the largest commercial real estate investment fund in Central and Eastern Europe. He was in his early twenties and had just stumbled into the room he had been trying to reach his whole life.
A stint running a financial leasing business across Romania and Macedonia through the financial crisis followed. He kept the company alive when almost nothing around it survived, but left with more questions than answers about what he actually wanted to build. Then Daniel Kniaz called and asked him to join SumUp. Stoil knew nothing about payments. He joined anyway, became Daniel's right hand on the financial side, and spent the next nine and a half years leading every one of the company's ten acquisitions and raising over three billion dollars, running deals with Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan from an office in Sofia, which never stopped surprising people on the other end of the call.
He left in the summer of 2024. By October he was at a Pearl Jam concert in Ireland with Gareth Walsh, SumUp's former global head of compliance, and the conversation turned to what they should build together. They had both spent years inside one of Europe's most ambitious fintech companies watching CEE get treated as a footnote. Too fragmented. Too many currencies. Too complicated to bother with properly. They knew that was wrong, and they knew exactly what it would take to fix it.
Paypercut gives online merchants across Central and Eastern Europe a single integration to accept card payments, local payment methods, and buy now pay later, with multi-currency settlement built in. Stoil, Gareth, and co-founder Emil Savov are building the payments infrastructure the region has always deserved but never had.
Sector:
Fintech
Country:
Luxembourg / Bulgaria
Year
2026
Short Description
Paypercut is a payments platform built for online merchants across Central and Eastern Europe. It brings together card payments, local payment methods, buy now pay later, multi-currency settlement, and reconciliation into a single integration, replacing the fragmented stack that merchants in the region have had to piece together themselves.
Founders
Stoil Vasilev
,
Co-founder & CEO
Gareth Walsh
,
Co-founder
Emil Savov
,
Co-founder
Why we invested
Payments infrastructure in Central and Eastern Europe is fragmented in a way that has no good excuse. Merchants expanding across the region have had to stitch together separate PSPs, BNPL providers, local payment methods, and settlement rails country by country, because no one credible enough has bothered to fix it. Paypercut turns that complexity into a single integration layer, handling routing, reconciliation, and local checkout coverage across markets that the industry has written off as too complicated. Stoil, Gareth, and Emil spent a combined two decades at SumUp watching this problem from the inside. They know exactly where the infrastructure breaks down and what it takes to replace it. Founder-market fit this strong in a market this underserved is precisely the kind of opportunity we back at BlackWood.
Founder Story
Stoil Vasilev
,
Co-founder & CEO
Stoil grew up in Bulgaria with finance on his mind from the age of ten, when he read Dreiser's Titan and decided that was the world he wanted. He got there through persistence: the best university in Bulgaria for finance, a cold email to a Harvard-educated bank CEO that took nine months to get a response, and two unpaid weeks to earn a job offer. That job turned out to be the largest commercial real estate investment fund in Central and Eastern Europe. He was in his early twenties and had just stumbled into the room he had been trying to reach his whole life.
A stint running a financial leasing business across Romania and Macedonia through the financial crisis followed. He kept the company alive when almost nothing around it survived, but left with more questions than answers about what he actually wanted to build. Then Daniel Kniaz called and asked him to join SumUp. Stoil knew nothing about payments. He joined anyway, became Daniel's right hand on the financial side, and spent the next nine and a half years leading every one of the company's ten acquisitions and raising over three billion dollars, running deals with Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan from an office in Sofia, which never stopped surprising people on the other end of the call.
He left in the summer of 2024. By October he was at a Pearl Jam concert in Ireland with Gareth Walsh, SumUp's former global head of compliance, and the conversation turned to what they should build together. They had both spent years inside one of Europe's most ambitious fintech companies watching CEE get treated as a footnote. Too fragmented. Too many currencies. Too complicated to bother with properly. They knew that was wrong, and they knew exactly what it would take to fix it.
Paypercut gives online merchants across Central and Eastern Europe a single integration to accept card payments, local payment methods, and buy now pay later, with multi-currency settlement built in. Stoil, Gareth, and co-founder Emil Savov are building the payments infrastructure the region has always deserved but never had.
Stoil grew up in Bulgaria with finance on his mind from the age of ten, when he read Dreiser's Titan and decided that was the world he wanted. He got there through persistence: the best university in Bulgaria for finance, a cold email to a Harvard-educated bank CEO that took nine months to get a response, and two unpaid weeks to earn a job offer. That job turned out to be the largest commercial real estate investment fund in Central and Eastern Europe. He was in his early twenties and had just stumbled into the room he had been trying to reach his whole life.
A stint running a financial leasing business across Romania and Macedonia through the financial crisis followed. He kept the company alive when almost nothing around it survived, but left with more questions than answers about what he actually wanted to build. Then Daniel Kniaz called and asked him to join SumUp. Stoil knew nothing about payments. He joined anyway, became Daniel's right hand on the financial side, and spent the next nine and a half years leading every one of the company's ten acquisitions and raising over three billion dollars, running deals with Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan from an office in Sofia, which never stopped surprising people on the other end of the call.
He left in the summer of 2024. By October he was at a Pearl Jam concert in Ireland with Gareth Walsh, SumUp's former global head of compliance, and the conversation turned to what they should build together. They had both spent years inside one of Europe's most ambitious fintech companies watching CEE get treated as a footnote. Too fragmented. Too many currencies. Too complicated to bother with properly. They knew that was wrong, and they knew exactly what it would take to fix it.
Paypercut gives online merchants across Central and Eastern Europe a single integration to accept card payments, local payment methods, and buy now pay later, with multi-currency settlement built in. Stoil, Gareth, and co-founder Emil Savov are building the payments infrastructure the region has always deserved but never had.