The Problem With Payment Hardware

For decades, accepting card payments has meant buying or renting dedicated point-of-sale hardware — clunky terminals that cost money upfront, require maintenance, and lock merchants into long-term contracts with payment processors. For small businesses, mobile vendors, and anyone who needs to take a payment on the go, that hardware dependency is a real barrier: it's expensive to acquire, slow to deploy across a large workforce, and inflexible when a business needs to scale up or down quickly. In markets full of freelancers, pop-up retailers, and delivery couriers, the traditional POS model simply doesn't fit how commerce actually happens anymore.

What They're Building

Tapaya has built SoftPOS software infrastructure that turns any smartphone or tablet into a fully functional, secure payment terminal — no additional hardware required. By tapping into the NFC capabilities already built into modern consumer devices, Tapaya's software lets merchants, banks, and payment providers accept contactless card and wallet payments directly on off-the-shelf devices. That eliminates the cost and logistics of dedicated terminal hardware while giving businesses a payment acceptance solution they can deploy in minutes rather than weeks.

Based in Prague, Tapaya is building its SoftPOS platform as infrastructure other companies can integrate, positioning itself as the technology layer banks, acquirers, and fintechs can use to bring tap-to-pay capabilities to their own merchant customers without building the underlying software themselves. The company closed a €1M pre-seed round in April 2026 to expand its engineering team and accelerate go-to-market across European markets, with backing from Passion Capital, Depo Ventures, and BADideas.fund.

The Opportunity

SoftPOS adoption is accelerating quickly as card networks and regulators certify tap-to-pay-on-phone technology across more markets, and as merchants look for cheaper, faster alternatives to traditional card machines. By focusing on the software infrastructure layer rather than competing directly for merchant relationships, Tapaya is positioned to become a key enabler for banks and payment companies racing to bring SoftPOS capabilities to market — a strategy that lets it scale through partnerships rather than having to win over every individual merchant on its own.