Pagos bags $10M to find ways of improving companies’ payments infrastructure

Pagos Systems Inc. has nabbed a $10 million funding round to develop cloud services that can help companies such as online retailers process customer purchases more efficiently.

Underscore VC and Point72 Ventures jointly led the round, which was announced this morning. They were joined by a number of prominent angel investors including senior executives from Google LLC, Microsoft Corp. and other tech firms.

A large e-commerce company may process upwards of thousands of transactions every day. The ease with which customers can complete a purchase directly influences user experience, which in turn affects e-commerce companies’ revenue. The cost of processing payments is a key business factor, too, for a different reason: reducing transaction fees can improve a retailer’s profit margins.

Pagos, founded this year, is developing cloud services that help companies find opportunities to improve their payment infrastructure. The startup argues it’s addressing a gap in the market. 

There are many payment processing platforms that retailers can integrate into their websites and apps. However, payment processing platforms usually don’t provide a convenient way of answering business questions such as what is the average purchase size and how much it costs to process transactions. Online retailers in many cases have to build custom internal processes to find the operational insights they require, which is costly and complicated. 

Pagos believes there’s a better approach. The startup’s first cloud service, Peacock, enables companies to visualize key data about their payments infrastructure in graphs. The graphs allow business analysts to answer questions such as what percentage of purchases aren’t processed successfully and what are the reasons they aren’t completed. In the future, Paos plans to add more analytics features that will enable users to track additional metrics, such as the fees charged by payment processing providers.

Pagos’ other service is called Canary. The service also provides features for visualizing payments data, but has a different focus. Canary is designed to help companies detect notable business events, such as if the average purchase size on an e-commerce website increases or a payment processing platform experiences technical issues. Canary generates alerts to help organizations quickly respond to important developments.

Eventually, Pagos plans to offer more than 12 different services each aimed at optimizing a different aspect of processing payments. The services will be available as standalone offerings rather than as a suite, an approach that the startup believes can help it target a broader market. 

“No company has identical infrastructure, challenges or skills, and by introducing individually priced, free-to-try services, they are dramatically lowering the bar for any company to up their payment infrastructure optimization game,” Underscore VC Principal Sooah Cho and Partner Chris Gardner wrote in a blog post today. “The plan is to launch dozens of these services and eventually make them available to any customer globally.”

Pagos believes that it can save a considerable amount of work for companies. Some large retailers use not one but multiple payment processing platforms, one for which each channel through which they sell their products. Each payment processing platform comes with its own set of technical requirements and fees that have to be optimized separately. The task represents a major undertaking, even for a large company, which means that a tool capable of simplifying the workflow could save a considerable amount of time and resources. 

Smaller e-commerce companies could potentially also find the startup’s technology useful. They may have simpler payments infrastructure, but also less in-house technical expertise, which makes it difficult to perform tasks such as tracking how average purchase size changes over time.

Pagos’ funding round is the latest in a series of recent investments closed by financial technology startups targeting the enterprise market. In August, Rapyd Financial Network Ltd. raised $300 million to expand its enterprise payments platform and acquire other startups with technology that can complement its feature set. 

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