Global payments startup Adyen acquires Orb to provide billing software for enterprises

Adyen, a global payments company, has announced plans to buy Orb, a company that provides billing software for large businesses. The purchase price is $335 million, and Adyen will pay for it entirely with cash it already has on hand. 

The deal will be structured so that Orb becomes a subsidiary of Adyen. This means Orb will legally be owned by Adyen, but it will continue to operate with some independence under what is called an “incubator model.” In this setup, Orb can keep building its product while also benefiting from Adyen’s resources and customer base. 

The founders of Orb are also showing support for the deal. Instead of taking all of their money out, they plan to reinvest a significant portion of it by buying shares in Adyen. This signals that they believe in the long-term value of the combined companies.

Related Post: EXCLUSIVE: FairMoney in M&A talks with Shara

How Orb powers billing tools for enterprise customers

San Francisco-based Orb builds software to help large businesses manage how they charge customers. The core of what Orb does is track how much a product is used in real time. It then takes complicated pricing rules and turns them into clear bills that companies can send to their own customers. 

Orb was founed in 2021. In 2024, the company raised $25 million in a Series B funding round. With that new investment, Orb has now raised $44 million in total. Today, Orb works with well-known technology companies worldwide. Some of its clients include Vercel, Glean, Replit, and Supabase. 

These businesses use Orb to handle usage-based pricing at a large scale. “Standalone billing systems are fundamentally limited because they operate blind to transaction execution,” said Alvaro Morales, CEO of Orb. 

“We built our architecture to process complex consumption logic at the event level, giving merchants total flexibility over their pricing frameworks.” Orb gives enterprises the tools to measure usage and convert it into revenue, and it has grown quickly with strong backing and major customers since its founding. 

Adyen is helping businesses transition to usage based pricing

How digital companies make money and send bills has become much more complicated since AI went mainstream. Many companies are moving away from flat monthly fees and toward usage-based pricing. In this model, customers pay for what they actually use. 

To support this, companies need systems capable of processing millions of usage events per second. Because of this change, billing is becoming a key channel for entering fast-growing digital businesses. 

Both current customers and new customers are asking Adyen to help solve this problem. The Dutch fintech company handles payments for businesses by serving as both a payment processor and a bank that can accept payments directly. Payments and billing should work together, but right now they usually do not. They run as separate systems, which means useful information gets stuck on each side. 

“Our customers increasingly need infrastructure that can handle complex, high-volume usage models, particularly as AI reshapes how software is priced and consumed,” said Ingo Uytdehaage, Co-CEO of Adyen. “The structural complexity of modern billing has become the kind of infrastructure problem Adyen is built to take on.”

If Adyen connects payments and billing, both sides get smarter. First, billing data can improve Adyen’s Dynamic Identification system. This helps all of Adyen’s products better understand customers. 

Second, real-time payment data and risk scores can improve billing. This helps reduce fraud and ensures more payments go through successfully. In short, combining payments with billing gives Adyen and its customers better data, less fraud, and higher success rates at a time when usage-based business models are growing fast.

Related Post: Flutterwave acquires Mono for $30 million in all-stock deal. Here is some backstory.

Why this deal is crucial for Adyen’s next growth phase

“Combining Orb’s billing product with Adyen’s payments platform closes the loop between what merchants charge and how those charges perform, enabling merchants to automate smarter revenue decisions in real time,” Uytdehaage said. 

What makes Orb stand out is how its technology is built. Most billing systems collect and summarise usage data too early. Orb does something different. It stores every usage event at scale. Because of this, the data collection process is separate from the invoice creation process. 

This design gives large companies much more flexibility. They can build pricing in different ways. They can test new pricing models using past data. And they can improve how they generate revenue over time without being constrained by their billing system. 

To keep Orb moving quickly, Adyen will initially use an incubator model. This means Orb will continue to run on its own during the early stages of the deal. Adyen will also continue to support environments where merchants use more than one payment service provider. 

After this first stage, the goal is to bring everything together. The long-term plan is to offer merchants one unified system that handles both billing and payments in a single infrastructure. In short, Orb’s technology gives companies better control over pricing and revenue. Adyen plans to maintain that speed now and combine payments and billing into one product later.

This deal comes at the same time as Adyen’s acquisition of Talon.One. Together, the two moves mark a clear shift for the company. Adyen is moving beyond being only a payment processor. It is now building toward a platform that can make real-time decisions and improve transaction handling. As payment processing becomes more common and less differentiated, these steps help Adyen protect its premium value by offering smarter tools beyond payments.

Last updated: July 13, 2026