Payhawk opens Stockholm office as new Nordic headquarters

Payhawk has opened an office in Stockholm that will serve as the headquarters of a new Nordic region spanning Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Iceland. The London-based spend management company made the announcement on 30 September, its eleventh office worldwide, based out of Founders House in the city centre.

The move lands weeks after Payhawk said it had passed $100m in annual recurring revenue, and it signals where the company wants to put that growth to work. Rather than simply selling into the Nordics from abroad, Payhawk is building local banking infrastructure around the launch, including krona-denominated accounts, cards and IBANs due in the fourth quarter of this year.

Why Stockholm, why now

Payhawk already had a foothold in the region. The company says close to 100 businesses across the five Nordic countries run their spending through its platform, including local entities of international groups and companies headquartered in the region itself. Among its named customers is the Swedish arm of manufacturing group CERATIZIT.

Sofie Svensson, the group's finance manager, said the appeal was less about any single feature than about consolidation: "The bigger advantage is managing spend for multiple group companies in a single platform, with workflows that route approvals seamlessly." She also credited the SAP integration with saving significant time each month.

The company frames the dedicated region as a bet that Nordic finance teams are a better match for its product than most. Its own research suggests Nordic finance leaders rate their teams' AI maturity above their European peers, even though it says around four in ten still handle spend management manually. That gap between ambition and daily practice is effectively the sales pitch: close it with software rather than headcount.

Local rails instead of a price list

The practical part of the launch is the banking build-out. Swedish companies will be able to hold balances in krona, issue krona cards and pay local suppliers without currency conversion sitting in the middle, according to the announcement. Swedish IBANs will let businesses top up accounts and settle bills directly, and supplier invoices sent over the Peppol network will flow straight into accounts payable. The firm already operates in Sweden under its EU electronic money institution licence, and lists native integrations with SAP, NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Visma Net.

Hristo Borisov, Payhawk's chief executive and co-founder, framed the launch as a deliberate contrast with how foreign fintechs sometimes treat the Nordics. "We are investing significantly in the capabilities Swedish businesses need: support for the krona, local payment rails, a Stockholm-based team, and AI agents that handle the busywork within the controls finance teams already trust," he said, adding that Payhawk was not entering as a foreign platform with a Swedish price list.

That last part refers to Payhawk's broader push into agentic finance tools, marketed under the name AI Office of the CFO. The suite includes a Financial Controller Agent for closing the books, a Procurement Agent for purchase requests, a Travel Agent for booking and paying for trips, and a Payments Agent for chasing down failed transactions or reimbursements. A newer Implementation Agent is meant to configure the system for new customers, and the company has also built automated workflow templates, called Playbooks, that run inside tools such as Claude or ChatGPT.

A crowded region

The firm is not alone in chasing Nordic finance teams. The region is home to Pleo, the Danish spend management company that built much of its early business on exactly the kind of mid-market customers Payhawk is now targeting, and the two compete directly across corporate cards and expense management. Payhawk's pitch is that it covers a wider slice of the spend cycle, from cards and expenses through to accounts payable, procurement and travel, on one platform rather than several.

It was founded in London in 2018 by Hristo Borisov, Boyko Karadzhov and Konstantin Dzhengozov, has raised roughly $239m to date, including two Series B rounds led by Lightspeed Venture Partners that helped it become the first Bulgarian-founded unicorn in 2022. It now says it serves close to 7,000 businesses across more than 33 countries, with over €5bn moving through its platform annually.

Whether a Stockholm headquarters and krona-denominated accounts are enough to pull Nordic customers away from entrenched local and regional rivals will depend on how quickly Payhawk can turn its ARR growth into on-the-ground sales. The company has not said how large its Stockholm team will be or whether further Nordic offices are planned.