Modulr was founded in 2016 by Myles Stephenson and Tony Boorman, with a premise rooted in a straightforward observation: the payments infrastructure underpinning most businesses was slow, opaque, and built for a pre-digital era. The company set out to offer a payments-as-a-service API platform, allowing businesses and software platforms to embed payment accounts, automate money movement, and issue cards without building core infrastructure themselves.
The Edinburgh and London-based firm operates as a regulated e-money institution, which gives it direct access to UK payment schemes including Faster Payments and Bacs. That regulatory footing is a meaningful differentiator; clients connect to payment rails through Modulr rather than routing through a sponsor bank, reducing friction and improving settlement speed. The platform is used across payroll, lending, travel, and financial services sectors, with clients including accountancy software providers and staffing platforms that need to move money at scale and with precision.
Modulr raised a £9 million Series A in 2017 and subsequently attracted investment from Blenheim Chalcot and PayPal Ventures, among others, signalling early confidence from both strategic and institutional backers. The company expanded into European markets, adding support for SEPA payments alongside its UK infrastructure.
For operators, Modulr represents a broader shift in how businesses think about financial infrastructure. Rather than treating payments as a back-office function bolted onto a core product, a growing cohort of scale-ups now treat embedded payment capability as a product feature in its own right. Modulr's trajectory illustrates both the commercial appetite for that model and the regulatory complexity that any serious player in the space must navigate.