Why we partnered with Onlayer

Onlayer is changing the way financial institutions and payment service providers manage the merchants they serve. In a market still dominated by manual, compliance-only tools, the company has built a unified platform that automates onboarding, monitors merchants in real time, and surfaces commercial opportunities that would otherwise remain hidden. It is this combination—risk management and revenue enablement in a single system—that first caught our attention at Oleka, and which has convinced us that Onlayer is poised to become the regional leader in merchant lifecycle management.

The shortcomings of the status quo are well known to anyone who has worked in acquiring or payment services. Merchant onboarding is slow, often taking weeks. Compliance requirements are complex and vary between jurisdictions, creating high operational costs. Monitoring, when it happens at all, is reactive—conducted in monthly batches and focused narrowly on avoiding card scheme fines. Institutions are left with blind spots in their portfolios, missing both early signs of risk and opportunities to grow their best merchant relationships.

A Platform Built for Speed, Depth, and Adoption

Onlayer’s approach is different. Its “Know Your Merchant” platform automates the entire merchant lifecycle, from instant onboarding and underwriting to continuous monitoring and PCI-DSS management. A merchant’s URL or company details are enough for the system to pull hundreds of data points from diverse sources, using an AI engine to detect patterns and anomalies that human review could never process at scale. Because the platform serves not only risk and compliance teams but also sales, marketing, and operations, it becomes deeply embedded in the client’s workflows. One customer, a leading Turkish PSP, uses it across seven separate departments—a level of adoption that creates strong retention and expands account value over time.

This differentiation has been built with exceptional capital efficiency. Onlayer has reached multi-million-dollar recurring revenue while consuming less than half a million dollars in external capital, operating at or near breakeven. Lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratios are well above industry benchmarks, with payback periods measured in months.

From a Strong Home Base to a Regional Opportunity

Although Turkey is a relatively small market in absolute terms, it has provided the ideal launchpad. With more than 750 regulated institutions requiring onboarding and risk solutions, and minimal competition from global incumbents, Onlayer has been able to build a dominant local position. This base is now the springboard for a much larger opportunity across MENA, where the serviceable market is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The region’s digital commerce is growing rapidly, driven by young, connected populations and government-led initiatives, while regulatory oversight is becoming stricter and more consistent. For international competitors, this combination of growth and complexity has proved difficult to navigate. For a regional player with a proven platform and local execution capability, it is fertile ground.

The company’s partnership with Mastercard is a key asset here. In 2025, Onlayer became one of the few companies globally to be designated as a Mastercard-approved Merchant Monitoring Service Provider. The endorsement signals quality to potential clients, provides direct access to Mastercard’s network of banks and PSPs across MENA, Eastern Europe, and APAC, and offers customers a compelling return on investment: using an approved provider can, in some cases, eliminate compliance fines entirely. What’s important is that Onlayer’s early success was not dependent on this partnership—it is additive to an already working model, giving the company both a powerful growth channel and the independence to succeed on its own merits.

Leadership with Reach and Credibility

The leadership team has the mix of skills and networks needed to capture this opportunity. CEO Kıvanç Harputlu, COO Tunç Yıldırım, and CTO Emre Aydın combine sales leadership, compliance expertise, and deep technical acumen, honed in previous work together in fintech infrastructure. Around them they have assembled senior executives from Mastercard, American Express, Ingenico, Klarna, PayPal, and Amazon Payment Services, bringing both credibility and connections into the boardrooms of potential clients. They have shown adaptability in pivoting from their initial product to the current platform and discipline in maintaining a lean, effective operation.

The Road Ahead

With our investment, Onlayer will be pursuing three parallel priorities: deepening its dominance in Turkey; accelerating expansion into high-potential MENA markets such as Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt; and launching its transaction monitoring suite, a product that opens a market several times larger than its current base, with higher average contract values and strong cross-sell potential. These moves position the company not only as a leader in merchant lifecycle management but as a broader compliance and performance intelligence platform for financial institutions globally.

For us at Oleka, Onlayer represents the convergence of a structural market shift, a differentiated and validated product, and a leadership team capable of executing with discipline and ambition. We believe they can become the standard for merchant risk and performance management in the region—and a strategic asset for the global payments ecosystem.