Billie

Billie is a B2B payments platform built around the fact that a business buyer rarely wants to pay by card at checkout: it offers Pay Later (net terms after delivery), Pay in X (instalments) and Pay on Account (an ongoing trade credit line), with Billie paying the merchant upfront in every case regardless of whether or when the buyer settles.

The company reports processing more than €3 billion in transaction volume for over 9,000 merchant partners and 1.3 million active business buyers, and rather than only selling its own checkout, Billie plugs into Stripe, Adyen, Mollie and Klarna as a payment method inside those platforms.

Billie GmbH is registered in Berlin (Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, HRB 182428 B) and supervised by BaFin, Germany's federal financial regulator; the entity was incorporated in December 2016 and renamed Billie in March 2017, and is run by its three co-founders Aiga Senftleben, Christian Grobe and Matthias Knecht, who previously built the SME lender Zencap.

Public filings show 31 known shareholders rather than a single controlling parent, including the German investor Rocket Internet SE; Billie's own pages do not publish a full investor list, so a precise ownership breakdown beyond that cannot be confirmed.

Billie is not a substitute for the card and bank-transfer processors that make up most of this category; it solves a different problem, the one where a business buyer wants an invoice and 30 or 60 days rather than a card form.

That makes it a natural pairing with, rather than a replacement for, Adyen, Mollie or Klarna — all three already integrate Billie as a B2B payment option — and it carries the same trade-off Klarna carries for consumer BNPL: merchant fees are not published and are negotiated per contract, priced against the credit and fraud risk Billie is taking on.

What Billie does well

• Merchant is paid upfront regardless of the buyer's payment behaviour
• Three checkout options: pay later, pay in instalments, trade account
• BaFin-supervised in Germany, not an unregulated fintech
• Integrates with Stripe, Adyen, Mollie and Klarna as a checkout option
• Over 9,000 merchants and 1.3 million active business buyers

Where Billie falls short

• No published merchant fees; pricing is negotiated per contract
• B2B invoice financing only, no consumer or plain card processing
• Credit and fraud risk assessment adds integration and underwriting complexity
• Smaller and younger than the card and bank-transfer processors in this category

Standout feature. Trade credit as checkout: Billie pays the merchant immediately and takes on the buyer's payment risk, the same logic as Klarna but built for B2B invoices.