ADYEN

In 2006, Pieter van der Does and Arnout Schuijff were working at Bibit, a Dutch payments company that had been acquired by Royal Bank of Scotland. The acquisition went fine.

The corporate bureaucracy that came with it did not. They wanted to rebuild payment infrastructure from the ground up — none of the legacy spaghetti code, none of the patchwork of regional processors that made cross-border payments a nightmare.

So they left. Took a small team with them.

Named the new company Adyen, a word from Surinamese slang that loosely means 'start over again.' Which is exactly what they did.

The founding thesis was simple and, at the time, genuinely contrarian: build one global platform instead of stitching together local payment processors for every country. Most payment companies at the time were a mess of acquisitions — a German processor here, a Brazilian one there — all duct-taped into something that sort of worked.

Adyen decided to own the entire stack. Write the code once.

Run it everywhere. That decision is basically the entire reason the company is worth what it is today.

They spent the first few years quietly building. No flashy fundraising rounds.

No press tours. Just product.

By the time eBay signed them as a payment processor in 2013 — replacing PayPal, which eBay literally owned — the industry sat up and paid attention. If eBay was switching, something was happening.

Adyen makes money by taking a cut of every transaction it processes. That's the core of it.

A company like Netflix or Uber routes their customer payments through Adyen, and Adyen takes a small percentage plus a fixed fee per transaction. Simple in concept.

Extremely complex in execution.

What makes the model interesting is that Adyen isn't just a middleman passing payments from A to B. They're a licensed acquirer in most major markets — meaning they have direct relationships with Visa, Mastercard, and local payment networks, rather than going through intermediaries.

Cutting out the middlemen means lower costs, faster settlement, and more data on what's actually happening with each transaction. That data is increasingly valuable.

Adyen also offers unified commerce — the idea that a retailer's in-store payments, online payments, and app payments all run through the same system. So when you buy something at H&M's website and return it in-store, that's all one clean system rather than two separate ones that have to talk to each other badly.

For large enterprise retailers, this is genuinely transformative. The pricing model is modular — companies pay for what they use.

No locked-in annual contracts pushing features nobody asked for. That sounds obvious.

In enterprise B2B, it is not.

The Adyen platform is the core product — a single, globally unified payment processing system that handles online, in-store, and in-app payments. Merchants get one dashboard, one API, one settlement, one reporting view across every geography.

For a company operating in 30 countries, that's not a small thing.

Adyen for Platforms is a product built specifically for marketplaces and platforms — think Uber paying its drivers, or eBay handling seller payouts. It handles the incredibly complicated money-flow problems that come with multi-party transactions: splitting funds, holding them in escrow, managing regulatory compliance across jurisdictions.

Most companies build this in-house. It is miserable.

Adyen built it properly once and rents it out.

Adyen Issuing lets merchants issue their own branded cards — payment cards that run on Adyen's infrastructure. A company like Lightspeed (a point-of-sale company) can give its merchants a card to use for business expenses, and the whole thing runs through Adyen.

This is the company's move into embedded finance — turning payments infrastructure into a platform for financial products.

Data and analytics is increasingly where the differentiation lives. Because Adyen owns the whole stack, it has visibility into transaction data that third-party processors don't.

Fraud detection, authorization rate optimization, customer behavior insights — the data products are becoming as valuable as the payment processing itself.

Adyen did almost no marketing for most of its existence. Genuinely.

No ads. No growth hacks.

No referral programs. They grew by being so good at the product that the biggest companies in the world told each other about them.

Word of mouth, but for CFOs.

The eBay deal in 2013 was the unlock. Once you're processing payments for one of the largest e-commerce platforms on the planet, every enterprise finance team in the world at least has to take a meeting with you.

Adyen used that credibility to sign Spotify, Netflix, Uber, Microsoft, McDonald's, and Airbnb. Not because they had the best sales team — because the product genuinely worked where competitors' products fell apart at scale.

The other counterintuitive move was staying enterprise-only. When Stripe launched in 2011 and started hoovering up startups and small businesses, Adyen made no attempt to compete in that market.

No self-serve sign-up. No startup pricing.

You had to be doing serious volume to even get a conversation. That discipline kept complexity out of the system and kept the product focused on what large businesses actually need: reliability, global coverage, and data.

The IPO in June 2018 was another strategic signal. Adyen listed on Euronext Amsterdam, deliberately avoiding US exchanges.

The stock opened at €400 per share, against an IPO price of €240. It was Europe's biggest tech IPO in years and a statement that you didn't need Silicon Valley to build a world-class financial infrastructure company.

In 2023, Adyen had a very public bad year. Revenue growth slowed sharply — from 26% to single digits in the first half.

The stock fell 39% in a single day in August 2023, wiping out roughly €15 billion in market cap. That is a bad day.

The problem wasn't the product. It was the workforce.

Adyen had under-hired relative to its growth ambitions, particularly in North America, and lost market share to competitors who had more boots on the ground. It was a rare operational stumble for a company that had been almost robotically consistent.

They were also facing renewed pressure from Stripe, which had become increasingly credible in the enterprise space — Adyen's home turf.

There's also the longer-term structural question: Adyen's entire model depends on transaction volume. When e-commerce growth slows — as it did sharply after the pandemic boom — Adyen's growth slows with it.

The company is working hard to diversify into financial services products for its merchant clients (lending, banking, cards), but it's still primarily a payments volume business. If consumer spending softens globally, Adyen feels it fast.

The 2023 stumble was a reminder that even the best-run companies in the best market positions have execution risk.

Adyen raised relatively little outside capital given the scale of the company it became. The most notable institutional backer was General Atlantic, which invested in 2015 and held shares through the IPO.

That investment valued the company at around $2.3 billion before it went public — which looked conservative by the time the stock opened at €400 a share in 2018.

The founders retained significant ownership through the IPO, which was a deliberate choice. Van der Does and Schuijff were never interested in the VC funding carousel — they built the company to profitability early and didn't need to keep diluting.

When Adyen did raise money, it raised strategically and sparingly. The 2014 round was $250 million from a group that included General Atlantic, Iconiq Capital, and Index Ventures — enough to fuel the international expansion without giving up meaningful control.

Post-IPO, Adyen is owned primarily by institutional investors and its own employees. There are no Sequoia or a16z stake worth billions to point to.

The company funded itself to greatness on revenue, not investor capital. For a company that processed over €900 billion in payment volume in 2023, the total venture funding was genuinely modest.

That discipline in capital-raising mirrors the discipline in product strategy — focused, deliberate, unglamorous.