Danish startup Flatpay joins the club of European fintech ... | TechCrunch

Flatpay’s €1.5 B Unicorn Leap: AI‑Enabled Payments and Scaling SMB Growth in 2025 { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Article", "headline": "Flatpay’s €1.5 B Unicorn Leap: AI‑Enabled Payments and Scaling SMB Growth in 2025", "datePublished": "2025-11-14", "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Jordan Lee" }, "publisher": { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Fintech Frontier" } } Flatpay’s €1.5 B Unicorn Leap: AI‑Enabled Payments and Scaling SMB Growth in 2025 Executive Snapshot: In November 2025 Flatpay surged to a €1.5 billion valuation after securing a €145 million Series C round that pushed total funding to roughly €300 million. Within nine months of the public announcement, merchant counts jumped from 7,000 to 60,000 and the company crossed €100 million ARR in October 2025. The catalyst behind this meteoric rise is a flat‑rate pricing model combined with an in‑person sales force that delivers rapid onboarding for European SMBs still shackled by legacy payment hardware. Strategic Business Implications of Flatpay’s Growth Trajectory From the perspective of an AI startup advisor, Flatpay exemplifies how a clear value proposition—flat pricing on a hybrid hardware‑software stack—can unlock deep market penetration when paired with strategic capital deployment. The company has taken a niche terminal‑to‑cloud solution and amplified it into a full‑stack payments ecosystem that competes with Adyen, Stripe, and legacy banks on price transparency while maintaining a human touch. Capital Efficiency vs. Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): Flatpay’s CAC remains high—underpinned by field sales, demo events, and 24/7 support—but the flat‑rate model turns each transaction into predictable revenue that scales linearly with merchant volume. Investors are willing to fund aggressive headcount expansion because the marginal cost of adding a new merchant is low once the hardware and software stack are in place. Unit Economics Reimagined: With gross margins around 70 % on hardwar