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Chronicles

The story behind the story

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Amsterdam-based Mollie, which offers plugins and an API to easily integrate payments into a site or an app, raises $106M Series B led by TCV valuing it at $1B+

Ingrid Lunden / TechCrunch :

TechCrunch Ingrid Lunden

Context & Ripple Effects

This $106M Series B made Mollie one of Europe's first payments-API unicorns, and it set up everything that followed: within nine months the Amsterdam company raised an $800M round at a $6.5B valuation led by Blackstone Growth, and by late 2025 it had grown from plugin vendor into an acquirer, agreeing to buy London-based GoCardless for €1.5B.

The round also fits TCV's pattern of backing API-first financial infrastructure — the same firm led Berlin-based Mambu's €100M round for its banking-as-a-service APIs three months later — and it gave Mollie the balance sheet to bundle services like the BNPL partnership with Dutch provider in3 that followed in 2022.

First-order effects

  • Mollie enters the unicorn club with fresh capital to scale its plugins-and-API model for SMB developers and merchants, while lead investor TCV adds a second European fintech-API bet alongside Mambu.

Second-order effects

  • Rival payment platforms face pressure on developer experience rather than just pricing, and adjacent players like in3 gain distribution by plugging BNPL into Mollie's merchant base instead of building their own integrations.

Third-order effects

  • The trajectory from this round — mega-round, then the €1.5B GoCardless acquisition — points toward European payments consolidating around API platforms that absorb adjacent flows like direct debit, shrinking the space for single-product fintechs.

The trend: European payments infrastructure is consolidating around developer-facing API platforms that use venture-scale rounds to acquire adjacent payment flows.

Discussion

  • @hellahueck Hella Hueck on x
    Holly mac. ⁦@MolliePayments⁩ is een 🦄 geworden. Dutch payments startup Mollie raises $106M at $1B+ valuation. https://techcrunch.com/...