Why we invested in SymphoPay

Future of payments

I am proud to announce Early Game Venture’s investment in SymphoPay, the middleware platform that adds marketing capabilities and analytics to all existing POS devices turning them into actual computers.

Here is how we think of the future of payments and why we led SymphoPay’s €650,000 ($750,000) seed round.


Technology is reshaping both retail and finance — and payments sit at the confluence of the two giant industries.


We see a transition happening today from customers paying with cash or with credit/debit cards to payments done using a variety of devices and technologies: QR codes (they are mainstream in China), mobile phones, NFC tags, smart watches, and other wearables. In the future, customers won’t use any device at all — computer vision and facial recognition make possible in-store experiences that are not only cash-free but payment-free (see Amazon’s experiments with cashier-less stores).

With the payments becoming device agnostic, managing loyalty programs, marketing campaigns, and providing analytics on top of these becomes a real pain.

The solution provided by SymphoPay is a middleware platform, sitting in between the secure servers doing the processing in the cloud and the multitude of hardware devices used by retailers and customers to accept and make payments. Notably, as an entry market strategy, SymphoPay’s platform works with the POS devices already existing in the market (the POS are dumb devices and haven’t changed since the ’70s) making it easier for the banks to adopt the platform.


Investing in SymphoPay is consistent with our Infrastructure for innovation thesis. The middleware platform has 1) the power to solve today’s problems of banks and retailers and 2) the potential to orchestrate, streamline and ease the usage of different paying devices in the future. SymphoPay is building the payments infrastructure for the reviving brick and mortar retail industry and we want to be part of this.