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Stockholm and Chennai, since 2019

A payments company built by people who had seen how it usually goes.

Surfboard was started in 2019 by people who had spent their careers in payments and security, and who had a fairly specific idea of what they did not want to build again. Cloud-native from the first line, card-present from the first customer, and no lock-in anywhere in it.

  • 2019 Founded in Stockholm
  • ~50 Surfers across two offices
  • 2 Cities: Stockholm and Chennai
  • 1 Payment institution licence, from Finansinspektionen
I The story

Changing the payment landscape, one tap at a time.

We are a paytech company built on cloud-based payments in physical environments, which in 2019 was an unfashionable thing to care about. Card-present was supposed to be solved. It was not.

The team is small enough that everyone still talks to customers, and experienced enough to know which parts of a payment platform you cannot take shortcuts on. Around fifty of us now, across two offices and a handful of other cities.

The Surfboard Payments office
II How we work

Your challenges make us better.

A POS provider in a restaurant and a journal system in a dental clinic want completely different things from the same API. We cannot run the same playbook twice, and that turns out to be the useful part.

  • Every use case is a new one

    Self-checkout kiosks in a clinic, a terminal doing thousands of transactions a day in a restaurant chain. Supporting both is what keeps the platform general.

  • We start projects together

    Discovery workshops, weekly calls, soft launches, pilots. Nobody gets handed an API key and wished luck.

  • Onboarding and logistics in-house

    Merchant onboarding, device provisioning and the logistics centre are ours, so the parts that usually go wrong are ours to fix.

  • Experts in our bit, not yours

    Our partners know their industry better than we ever will. Our job is to be unambiguously good at payments.

“We are fully focused and dedicated to offer our partners the best possible payment product in the market.”

Askin Samuel, Tech

III Where we are

Two cities, nine and a half hours apart.

It means someone is nearly always awake when a merchant needs something, which was not the plan but has turned out to be one of the better accidents in the company's history.

The Stockholm office

Sweden

Stockholm

The first office, and where the company started. Barnhusgatan 4, a short walk from Cityterminalen and just off Drottninggatan.

The Chennai office

India

Chennai

Opened when one of the co-founders moved home. In the middle of the city, close to most of what matters in it, and now half the company.

IV Arias Home of Hope

What we sponsor

Dream big regardless of circumstances.

Arias Home of Hope is a school and orphanage in India for HIV-positive children, in a part of the world where that diagnosis still gets children shunned. It is a place where they are defined by what they might do rather than what they carry.

Surfboard sponsors it. The teachers do the work; we help pay for the room they do it in, the books they do it with, and the meals in between.

Children at Arias Home of Hope
V Come and build

Work with us, or come and work here.

If you are building software that needs to take money, we would like to hear what you are building. And if you would rather help build the platform underneath it, that conversation is open too.

Get in touch Read the API docs