Index Ventures
Series A lead · 2023 · partner: Hannah Seal (board observer). Index also backs Adyen at growth stage and our customer Tessera.
// founder story
Twelve years in the payments path, then a year of saying yes
Marc Hessel spent twelve years inside the largest European acquirer, last role: lead architect on the cross-border routing platform. He watched merchants ask the same question for a decade: "Why can my €240 payment fail at one PSP but succeed at another four seconds later, on the same card?" The internal answer was always the same: rails differ, issuers differ, time-of-day differs — and your single PSP can't fix that for you.
In late 2020, Marc was helping a Series B SaaS migrate from one PSP to another. They lifted their auth rate by 4.3% — but only because they happened to switch to the right rail for their geography mix. He realised the actual fix wasn't "switch PSPs": it was "stop choosing one." Six weeks of weekend coding produced the first prototype: route a transaction through whichever rail predicted the best chance of authorisation, retry on the next-best if the first declined.
Whaliepay launched in February 2021 with two engineers and a single fintech customer in Lyon. By Q4 we'd hit 28 customers. Series A closed in September 2023 — €18M led by Index Ventures, with Earlybird and HV Capital following on. As of 2026 we route €4.2B/year across 18 PSPs for 280 merchants in 38 countries. No PSP rev-share. No merchant of record. No payment processor lock-in. Just the routing decision, every time.