Today, Dutch fintech firm Klearly announced it has raised €12 million as part of a Series A funding round led by PayPal Ventures with participation from Italian Founders Fund, Global PayTech Ventures, Antler Elevate, and Shapers – bringing the startup’s total funding raised to €20 million.
According to the company website, Klearly aims to offer “the go-to payment system for hospitality businesses,” especially in the food and beverages industry, enabling customers to order and pay from Android and iOS devices in restaurants and bars.
The solution offers integrations with a range of third party Point of Sale (POS) systems including Scanfie, Unitouch, Spont, unTill, and Povis, meaning that merchants don’t need to purchase new hardware or replace existing POS solutions.
“Klearly has a simple mission: to build Europe’s best payments system for restaurants, bars, and clubs. We’re not a generic payments player, and we don’t force merchants to switch POS. Instead, we provide a payment layer purpose-built for hospitality that supports leading operators and the leading POS providers,” Sam Koekoek, CEO of Klearly, said.
Hitting the ground running
Despite a sluggish economy, with cautious VC investment, Klearly has gained significant funding attention since it was founded in 2023 by Koekoek, Eva Rosa Bian, Edan Dil, Guy Griv, and Geus Walder – a team that is emphasizing a minimal-friction approach to digital payments and integrates with established third-party vendors.
Now, Klearly has 40 employees across offices in the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, and a development center in Tel Aviv. In the Netherlands, the startup has seen impressive early adoption with 4,000 merchants processing payments, raising almost €1 billion in annualized total payments. Tips to waiters alone through the platform have generated over €5,447,641.
This latest funding round will enable the company to expand into other markets, singling out Italy and Belgium as two areas where it seeks to establish go-to market teams. The move will help build a stronger presence across Europe.
Enriching the Netherlands’ restaurant payments ecosystem
With the value of digital payments totalling over €1 trillion annually in the EU, Klearly’s expansion into Italy and Belgium has the potential to be a lucrative move. But, the company is up against some well-established competition.
One of its most significant competitors is Stripe – valued at over $106 billion USD – with a total payment volume of over $1.4 trillion USD. Stripe also targets the restaurant payments ecosystem by offering the Stripe Terminal, a card reading machine which also offers integration with third party POS systems.
Rather than relying on hardware, however, Klearly has drawn on enabling users to order and pay with smartphones. The biggest advantage of this approach is that a restaurant doesn’t need to purchase new hardware to accept payments from customers through the platform.
“Klearly is hardware-agnostic, easy to deploy, and deeply integrated with leading POS systems. But the key is how we think about payments: not as the end of the meal, but as a moment to drive revenue and retention. We use the payment interaction to enable features that help restaurants turn guests into repeat customers and brand ambassadors,” Koekoek noted.
Such an approach landed a key partnership with Apple, which launched a Tap to Pay feature and made Klearly one of the first vendors to enable merchants to accept payments via Apple Pay with an iPhone.
Featured image: Klearly via LinkedIn