Does Porsche buy now, pay later? Zaver now has $30 million to make it happen

We last spoke with Zaver, the Swedish B2C buy now, pay later (BNPL) provider in Europe, when the company raised $5 million in funding in 2021. The company has now completed a $10 million extension to its Series A funding round, bringing its total Series A funding to $20 million. Total investment to date is $30 million.

In Europe, Zaver competes with Klarna, PayPal and existing banks such as Santander and BNP Paribas on BNPL.

However, Zaver’s trick is that it claims that through its risk assessment algorithm it can assess the risk of a BNPL shopping cart of up to €200,000 in real time. Other BNPL providers rarely fund more than €3,000, at least in Europe.

The company was founded in mid-2016 by Amir Marandi and Linus Malmén, both students at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The company has a strategic alliance with the Nissan Group and is focused on direct-to-consumer sales and customer relations with Volkswagen and Porsche in the Nordic region.

This allows customers to even buy cars on BNPL.

CEO and founder Amir Marandi told me the company is able to offer scale-agnostic payment solutions because much of its product development is not “on a linear regression model[like other models], but on advanced risk assessment algorithms.”

“While our competitors focus their efforts on marketing, our focus has always been on back-end engineering,” he said.

He believes that the declining acceptance rate of large-value transactions in the payments industry means that there is an opportunity for “payment platforms of unknown scale” to reach as much as 200,000 euros.

This may be the direction of development for the BNPL industry.

Early innovators such as Klarna, Trustly, Tink, and iZettle capitalized on this shift toward online payments, but the expansion of e-commerce infrastructure set the stage for an increase in the average online transaction value.

This shift first occurred in 2012 when Elon Musk proposed selling Teslas online, and now many OEMs are trying to use BNPL to go “direct-to-consumer.”

Investors in the Series A round include FROS Ventures, Hållbar AB, Hobohm Brothers Equity, JOvB Investments, MAHR Projects, Skagerack Ventures and King.com founders Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi.