Kick-off in September 2022, first transaction in April 2023, and 50M+ transactions inside eighteen months. What it takes to launch payments infrastructure that fast — without cutting the corners payments can't afford.
Straumur, a payment facilitator, was built from scratch. Kick-off was September 2022; the first live transaction ran in April 2023 — roughly seven months from a standing start to money moving. Within eighteen months the platform had processed more than 50 million transactions.
It wasn't one product but a set of them: merchant portals, APIs, hosted checkout and a Shopify plugin, all running on payment-grade infrastructure.
Launching payments quickly is easy to say and hard to do, because payments is exactly the domain where "looks right" isn't good enough. The system has to clear money, reconcile, and stand up to scrutiny from day one. Doing that in seven months is the clearest demonstration of what our platform discipline buys: speed that doesn't trade away correctness.
For the client, it was the difference between watching a market opportunity and being in it. Straumur describe the relationship as working with an extension of their own team — which is the kind of trust a build like this runs on.
Straumur runs on AWS, engineered for payment-grade reliability and scale. The same repeatable-platform habits we'd been refining since 2020 — versioned infrastructure, CI/CD on every pipeline, governance from the start — are what made a launch this fast survivable. The portals, APIs, hosted checkout and Shopify integration were delivered as a coherent product surface, not a pile of services.
Straumur sits alongside Netgíró as proof that the same company can run a thirteen-year relationship and a seven-month launch with equal seriousness. It's also part of the wider Kvika story — the structural partnership that, from 2022, turned a client relationship into a shared stake in the work.
The infrastructure layer under the launch.
Read more →