PayControl has been founded and funded. To understand why, you have to go back almost two decades.
How the category was born
DevCode Group built PaymentIQ in the early years of the studio, inside the venture that would become DevCode Payment AB. PaymentIQ went on to become one of the most successful payment orchestration platforms in the world, with DevCode Payment AB acquired by Bambora in 2017. It also, in a meaningful way, changed how the global payment industry thinks about routing.
Before that generation of products, merchants had two options. Build payment integrations yourself, one at a time, country by country. Or take the rough end of a single PSP and live with whatever that one provider offered. PaymentIQ and the platforms that followed it gave merchants something fundamentally new: the ability to orchestrate across payment methods, PSPs, and geographies through a single layer. A category was born. It grew. And as is the way of categories that grow, it filled up.
The category needed new thinking, not another orchestrator.
Why now, again
Today, the payment orchestration market is crowded with established platforms running on architectures that were modern in 2014. They work. But the thinking under the hood has not moved as fast as the market they sit in. Pedro Hansson and Nathan Salisbury shared a conviction: the orchestration category had stopped evolving.
Merchants who started orchestrating five years ago are now hitting the limits of the platforms they chose. Innovation slows. The merchant relationship with its own payment data starts to feel uncomfortably indirect. Customers we spoke with were asking the same question in different words. They wanted more influence over their payment flows. Some of them wanted the whole orchestration stack inside their own cloud.
That is the gap PayControl was created to fill. A tech team from DevCode Group was formed. PayControl was incorporated, with Nathan leading product. The thesis crystallised: merchants run orchestration inside their own infrastructure, with provider-agnostic routing, AI-driven decisioning, fraud logic, and native support for digital assets. The merchant keeps the data, the routing logic, and the optionality.
The first round
Fuel Investment led the first round. SeedLegals, which handled the legal mechanics, has since noted publicly that the close was among the fastest they had seen on the platform. The signal is clear. The thesis lands.
DevCode Group brings the studio model: capital, engineering, and operating support from two decades of building, exiting, and building again — including the decade we spent inventing this category the first time around. Nathan Salisbury leads product. The partnership puts conviction behind a thesis that is technically and commercially demanding, and informed by patterns we have already lived through once.
What the capital is for
Three priorities, in this order. First, a small senior team. Engineering, product, and a compliance lead who understands the regulated end of the merchant base.
Second, the orchestration runtime. The first version is operating today, deployed inside merchant cloud environments and running real transaction volume. Continuous Co-Development Loop, the operating model we are rolling out across the group, means the runtime evolves with every customer request.
Third, the partner network. PayControl is provider-agnostic by design. That only works if the adapter layer is wide. We are building partnerships with the major card schemes, account-to-account rails, and selected digital asset providers.
If you run payments at scale, and the autonomous-payments thesis is something you have been waiting for someone to build, write to us. Quietly is fine.
— Pedro Hansson, Group CEO