Most people have used PPRO without knowing it.
When a shopper in Germany pays by bank transfer on a US website, or someone in the Netherlands picks iDEAL at a checkout, the plumbing underneath is often the kind of thing PPRO built. It does not have an app or a famous logo. That is exactly the design, and it is also why the company is so little known.
Then the early online-payments world changed shape, and the investors arrived.
The company dates to 2006. Philipp Nieland and Tobias Schreyer are the founders named in company records and profiles, and they started from an observation that looks obvious now: outside the English-speaking world, people often do not pay by credit card. A merchant who accepts only cards loses customers in country after country. Each local method, though, needs its own bank links, rules and licences.
PPRO's job was to take that mess and offer it as a single connection.
For years the company grew quietly. Then the early online-payments world changed shape, and the investors arrived. HPE Growth was first, backing the company before 2015. That year a new chief executive came in from outside the founding team: Simon Black, who had spent about a decade at Sage and had run Sage Pay, the UK's biggest payment gateway for small business.
What the founders had built and what Black added were different skills. One was a product that worked across borders. The other was a way to scale it.
In 2018 PPRO raised $50M with PayPal and Citi Ventures involved. In January 2021, in the middle of the pandemic e-commerce boom, it raised $180M from Eurazeo and Wellington, with PayPal, Citi and JP Morgan alongside, and crossed into unicorn territory at a $1bn valuation. Black had by then led rounds totalling over $300M.
Then the leadership changed again. Black announced he would step down at the end of 2023, after nearly nine years. A further round of about $93M was reported in 2024.
PPRO's story is a reminder that not every great company has a single heroic founder at the centre. Two founders found the problem, an outsider helped industrialise it, and the rest was patience across borders.
Few consumers will ever see its name, and that suits it. If you are building infrastructure, the lesson is simple: the less the customer sees you, the more carefully you have to be trusted.