• Stripe has acquired startup legal infrastructure provider Clerky, expanding beyond payments into startup formation and ongoing corporate operations.
• The deal could help Stripe bring companies into its ecosystem earlier, establishing relationships during incorporation, fundraising, and hiring before startups ever need payment processing.
• Clerky complements Stripe Atlas with deeper legal workflows and attorney relationships, strengthening Stripe’s push to become a broader operating infrastructure layer for startups.

Payment infrastructure fintech Stripe is getting into a new infrastructure layer this week. The California-based company has acquired Clerky, a company that offers legal infrastructure that startups need during and after formation. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Clerky was founded in 2011 to help startups with legal paperwork surrounding incorporation and post-incorporation documentation, board actions, SAFEs and convertible notes, hiring documentation, stock and option issuances, and ongoing corporate maintenance. It also offers startup attorneys a private workspace that makes it easy to work with a startup’s clients and colleagues.

“As startup attorneys in Silicon Valley, we saw how our clients would try to get paperwork done faster and cheaper, but ended up paying us more in the end to fix everything,” Clerky said in its blog post. “We started Clerky to provide the experience our clients were looking for, but with our legal expertise built into the products.”

Acquiring Clerky will help Stripe bring startups into its ecosystem even earlier. Instead of waiting until a business needs payments, Stripe will use Clerky to help establish the relationship during incorporation, fundraising, and hiring. Ideally, Stripe will retain that company as it scales.

Additionally, Clerky will help Stripe expand Atlas from formation into startup operations. Atlas, which Stripe launched in 2016, lets founders incorporate a Delaware company, obtain an EIN, issue founder equity, file an 83(b) election, generate SAFEs, and then move directly into banking and Stripe’s payments ecosystem. While Atlas and Clerky overlap when it comes to startup formation, Clerky brings deeper legal workflows and relationships with startup attorneys.

Given these two elements, Stripe could possibly offer a more holistic startup ecosystem that helps startups incorporate, establish equity, fundraise, hire employees, accept payments, and manage money. While Stripe hasn’t announced this exact integration, it may help increase ecosystem stickiness.

Today, Clerky’s startup clients account for 23% of all Silicon Valley seed and pre-seed financings and together have raised over $140 billion in venture capital. Additionally, Clerky counts hundreds of attorney and paralegal clients that use its platform to work with their customers. Under Stripe’s ownership, Clerky plans to continue to build its client base and provide the same high level of service to startups and attorneys that it has in the past.

Stripe’s move is another example of fintechs moving upstream. By helping startups with formation and legal infrastructure before they ever need payment processing, Stripe can establish relationships earlier in a company’s lifecycle and potentially grow alongside those businesses. The acquisition also reflects Stripe’s broader evolution from a payments provider into an operating infrastructure layer for startups, giving founders more reasons to remain within its ecosystem as their companies scale.

Photo by KATRIN BOLOVTSOVA

• Basware has agreed to acquire payment fraud prevention company Trustpair, with the transaction expected to close later in 2026.
• The acquisition will extend Basware’s invoice lifecycle assurance through payment, combining its AP automation capabilities with Trustpair’s AI-driven account validation and payment fraud prevention.
• The deal reflects the convergence of AP automation, payments, and fraud prevention as AI-driven fraud increases demand for end-to-end transaction security.

Enterprise payment solutions company Basware announced it has agreed to acquire payment fraud prevention company Trustpair this week for an undisclosed amount. The transaction is expected to be completed later in 2026. 

Basware, provider of AP automation, e-invoicing, and compliance tools, anticipates that Trustpair’s fraud prevention tools will enhance its invoice lifecycle management tools by delivering invoice lifecycle assurance that covers the entire transaction. Basware will use its tools to confirm that an invoice is legitimate and approved, while Trustpair will confirm that the payment reaches the intended supplier.

Trustpair was founded in 2017 to secure enterprise payments using its AI-driven risk intelligence. Today, the South Carolina-based company serves more than 600 organizations by automating manual account validation to serve as a centralized, strategic layer of payment security.

“Trustpair was built around a simple belief: approving the right invoice is not enough if the money ultimately reaches the wrong account,” said Trustpair Co-Founder and CEO Baptiste Collot. “By bringing our capabilities together, we see the opportunity to give finance teams stronger protection across the full journey, from supplier onboarding and invoice approval through payment. Trustpair will continue to operate with the same team, platform, and commitment to our customers and partners across the finance environments they already use. Basware’s reach and resources will help us accelerate beyond what we could have achieved alone.”

Once the acquisition is finalized, Trustpair will leverage Basware’s intelligence spanning 2.5 billion invoices and 20 million suppliers to strengthen its validation models and gain a faster route to a wider customer base.

Founded in 1985, Basware’s invoice lifecycle management platform offers governed autonomy, continuous compliance, financial integrity, and enterprise control. By governing the entire AP process end-to-end across every country, and every ERP, Basware helps enterprises automate accounts payable while maintaining the controls needed to ensure invoices are legitimate, compliant, and accurately processed. Basware counts more than 6,500 customers worldwide, including DHL, Heineken, and NBC Universal Media.

“AI may be the most powerful productivity tool of our generation,” said Basware CEO Jason Kurtz. “Unfortunately, it is also becoming one of the most powerful tools ever placed in the hands of criminals. A finance team can do everything right on the invoice and still send the money to the wrong bank account. Basware has spent more than 40 years protecting the invoice. Bringing Basware and Trustpair together extends that protection through the payment itself. Together, we will offer the first end-to-end invoice-to-payment assurance in the market, strengthening financial integrity and continuous compliance across the invoice lifecycle.”

As AI tools proliferate, AP automation tools are expanding to better manage financial risk across the transaction lifecycle. AI is making payment fraud increasingly sophisticated, which means that validating and approving an invoice is no longer sufficient to ensure a legitimate transaction. Embedding payment validation into AP workflows gives platforms like Basware an opportunity to move beyond automating financial processes to protecting the movement of money itself. For fintechs, the shift could further blur the lines between AP automation, payments, and fraud prevention as businesses look for platforms that can manage and secure a transaction from invoice through payment.

Photo by Kindel Media

• Nayax plans to acquire smart parking technology provider IPS Group to expand its presence in parking and curb management.
• The acquisition will combine IPS’ parking technology and 250,000-space footprint with Nayax’s payments infrastructure and global reach, creating new expansion and cross-sell opportunities.
• The deal reflects Nayax’s “land and expand” M&A strategy and the broader convergence of payments and vertical software as payment providers move beyond transaction processing.

Global commerce, payments, and loyalty platform Nayax announced plans today to acquire smart parking technology provider IPS Group from Windjammer Capital Investors for an undisclosed amount.

Founded in 2000, IPS offers payment-enabled smart parking technology that processes millions of consumer payment transactions each year. The platform operates using physical infrastructure such as meters, combined with mobile and text-based payments, enforcement and permitting software, vehicle detection tools, and curb data analytics.

Nayax will tap IPS, which has two decades of experience building parking technology with an established base of more than 250,000 parking spaces. Nayax anticipates that its established reach across more than 120 countries will help IPS expand into new markets while giving its own customers access to a parking and curb management solution, adding cross-sell opportunities to Nayax’s existing offering. Nayax estimates that IPS will boost its addressable cashless opportunity to approximately $342 billion by 2029.

“Cities run some of the most demanding unattended commerce anywhere, with strict compliance requirements and infrastructure that must last a decade,” said Nayax CEO Yair Nechmad. “Together with IPS we can give cities a unified platform for the curb and run parking alongside EV charging.”

Nayax was founded in 2005 and offers cashless payment, IoT service, and management solutions for unattended retail stores. The Maryland-based company’s tools work best for high-frequency, low-value transactions for which Nayax provides end-to-end hardware, software, payments, and loyalty.

Acquisitions play a major role in Nayax’s growth strategy. In addition to today’s deal, the company has made 10 acquisitions over the past 21 years, following a “land and expand” playbook of acquiring established solution providers in specific verticals and integrating them with Nayax’s payments infrastructure. The strategy allows Nayax to leverage the acquired companies’ industry expertise and customer relationships while using its payments stack and global reach to scale their businesses into new markets.

“IPS fits perfectly into our M&A playbook,” said Nayax Chief Strategy Officer Aaron Greenberg. “We seek companies in verticals where payments and software work together, using our payment stack and infrastructure to take these businesses global. From hardware quality to payments strength, it is exactly the platform a combined Nayax-IPS represents.”

The deal shows how unique payments infrastructure can help organizations expand into specialized verticals. Rather than building industry-specific software and distribution from scratch, payments companies can acquire established vertical platforms and layer their existing payments capabilities onto them. The acquisition also reflects the continued convergence of payments and vertical software. As payments become increasingly embedded within industry-specific platforms, payment providers have an opportunity to move beyond transaction processing and own more of the technology their customers use to operate.

Photo by Joshua Santos