Founded by ex-Mastercard execs, Dublin-based WhenThen raises €5.08M to become your OS for payments

The brainchild of ex-Mastercard veterans, WhenThen, is a startup that claims to allow any developer (or savvy business user) to create payment flows in minutes, no matter how weird and complex. It provides a simple control centre for a finance and payment team to manage flows and payments data.

WhenThen raises Seed fund

In a recent development, the Ireland-based no-code payment operations platform announced that it has secured $6M (approx €5.08M) in its Seed round of funding. The round was co-led by Cavalry and Stride.VC.

Stride.VC is a venture capital firm based in London and dedicated to supporting entrepreneurs from the earliest days of their journey through to scaling.  

Berlin-based Cavalry is a European early-stage venture capital fund focusing on pre-seed and seed stage. Its portfolio companies comprise more than 40 companies including Forto, McMakler, PlanRadar, BRYTER, and REKKI..

Speaking about the startup, Claude Ritter, managing partner at Cavalry, explains, “Basic payment orchestration platforms have been around for some time, focusing mostly on maximising payment acceptance by optimising routing. WhenThen provides the first end-to-end payment flow platform to equip businesses with the opportunity to control every stage of the payment flow from payment intent to payout.”

Simplify and increase online payments for businesses

Founded in 2020, WhenThen allows businesses to create and automate any type and number of payment flows from capture payment on delivery to marketplace payouts – without code.

The platform empowers merchants to understand, automate, and optimise their payment flows which can result in higher customer conversion and revenues, and lower overhead and costs.

WhenThen is led by Kirk Donohoe, Eamon Doyle, and Dave Brown, veteran fintech and payments product and engineering executives from Mastercard Labs who have collectively spent over 25 years building complex payments flows for some of the world’s biggest merchants and issuers.

Kirk Donohoe says, “We see traditional businesses embracing e-comm, and e-comm merchants now operating multiple business models such as trade supply, marketplace, subscription, and more. There is no platform that makes it easy for such businesses to create and operate multiple payment flows to support multiple business models in one place – that’s where we step in.”

The company supports a wide range of payment providers, including Stripe, Braintree, Adyen, Authorize.net, Checkout.com, etc., and a variety of alternative and locally preferred payment methods, including Klarna Affirm, PayPal, BitPay, and many more. With an infrastructure in place, WhenThen provides merchants with the option of operating PSP-agnostic and allows them to switch providers easily.

How was WhenThen born?

As mentioned above, WhenThen’s founders have extensive experience in the payment industry. Together, they claim to have built some of the most innovative solutions Mastercard has launched in the last decade, such as Mastercard InControl, Simplify and QKr!.

Speaking about how he and his team came up with the idea for WhenThen, Kirk Donohoe explains, “When you can’t execute on your core business goals because your engineering team is distracted building and maintaining payment flows and integrating new payment gateways and other business platforms into them, a platform that allows you to do it all in one place, in minutes not months, really is a no-brainer.”

Besides WhenThen, the founders have previously founded Solvers, a fintech and payment product consultancy agency that witnessed considerable growth and revenue and partnered with brands such as Airbnb, American Express, British Airways, Mastercard and Bank of Montreal.