Trustly secures $40M from Nordic Capital for AI payments push
Three weeks after cutting a quarter of its staff, Trustly's own shareholders committed more than $40M to turn its $120bn payments network into an AI business intelligence engine.
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Founded 2008 · Stockholm, Sweden
Trustly, the Stockholm open banking payments company, has received signed equity commitment letters of more than $40M from its principal shareholder Nordic Capital and long-time backer Alfvén & Didrikson to accelerate AI-powered products that turn payment data into business intelligence, with the deal expected to conclude in November 2026.
The letters, announced on 2 October, are irrevocable and legally binding, per the company’s announcement, and other existing shareholders have been offered the opportunity to participate before the transaction closes. No new investor appears anywhere in the deal – the two names on the letters have been on Trustly’s cap table for years.
More than $40M, and not one new name on it
The money has one job: accelerate AI-powered products that turn payments into business intelligence – tools for customer acquisition, retention and risk management, built on the transaction data the network already carries. “This commitment from Nordic Capital and Alfvén & Didrikson is a vote of confidence in Trustly and where we’re headed,” said Group CEO Johan Tjärnberg in the announcement.
The timing is the sharp edge of this story. The commitment lands barely three weeks after Trustly confirmed it would cut around 200 roles, roughly a quarter of its workforce, in a restructuring made public in mid-September. Cost discipline first, then fresh capital pointed at the rebuild – the sequence looks deliberate, and the owners signed it.
Eighteen years of moving money without cards
Trustly was founded in Stockholm in 2008 and has spent eighteen years on a single idea: account-to-account payments that move money directly between bank accounts, with no card network in the middle. The scale that idea reached is easy to miss from outside. “Trustly is the payments network behind more than 50 million consumers and over $120bn in transactions a year,” Tjärnberg said in the same announcement, which also counts more than $100bn processed in 2025, over 9,000 merchant connections and reach into 650 million consumers through 12,000 banks across more than 30 markets.
The two backers know exactly what they are topping up. “Nordic Capital has backed Trustly since 2018, supporting its development of the largest open banking payments networks in Europe and North America,” said Nordic Capital’s Fredrik Näslund in the announcement. Hjalmar Didrikson went further back: “Fifteen years on from first backing Trustly, we remain as excited as ever about its future.”
An open banking market compounding at 27.6%
The market underneath is one of the steepest curves in fintech: global open banking was worth $31.54bn in 2024 and is forecast to reach $136.13bn by 2030, a 27.6% CAGR for 2025-2030 (MarkNtel Advisors, June 2025). For a network already moving $120bn a year, that growth is less about adding rails than about what you sell on top of them – which is precisely where the AI business intelligence products aim.
For scale against our own funding data: Givestar’s £9M round led by Mercia Ventures in late September was the only other European payments equity cheque we logged in the past fortnight, and Onomondo’s €100M+ growth round on 30 September shows what an external growth-stage cheque looks like this autumn. Trustly’s $40M sits in neither category: not a priced round with a new lead, but an inside top-up with a very specific job list.
When the next cheque comes from inside the cap table
So what does a round with zero new investors actually signal? I keep seeing the same pattern in our funding data this autumn: Europe’s scale-ups are retooling for AI, and the capital doing it is increasingly the capital already in the room. Two days ago we covered Metaview’s $60M Series C – a London company whose growth cheque came from New York. Trustly is the mirror image: a Stockholm company whose owners, Nordic to the core, looked at a hard restructuring year and decided the next $40M should be theirs too.
The reality is that commitment letters after a 25% staff cut are not a victory lap; they are a bet that the cost base is finally matched to the strategy. The good news is who made the bet – the shareholders with the most complete view of the numbers, eight and fifteen years into the position. We talk a lot about Europe’s missing growth capital; here is a case where it never left the table.
What to watch between now and the November close: whether the participation offer pulls the rest of the cap table in, what the first payments-to-intelligence products look like in production, and whether the next cheque into Stockholm’s payments champion carries an outside name again. Watch what ships before the ink dries.
