Papilio is built by the team behind Flatly — a New Zealand proptech that processes real rent payments across GoCardless, Stripe, and Akahu. We built the payment infrastructure once. Then we decided to make it available to every SaaS team that shouldn't have to build it themselves.
Most payments infrastructure is built for developers, by developers. That's fine — someone has to build it. But it means the person actually running the business is completely locked out. They can't ask a question without filing a ticket. They can't fix anything without a pull request. They find out about failed payments from their customers, not their system.
We know this because we lived it at Flatly. We built open banking rails, direct debit mandates, GoCardless and Stripe integrations, payment retry logic, Xero exports — the full stack. And the whole time, the non-technical people in the business couldn't touch any of it. Every question about a payment came to us. Every change went through us. It was the wrong way to build it.
Papilio is what we wish had existed. Infrastructure that a developer can be proud of architecturally, and that a founder can actually use. The same system, accessible to everyone on the team.
All four of us have worked on the payment and infrastructure problems Papilio solves. This isn't a side project.
Quinn leads product and engineering at Papilio. At Flatly he built the payment orchestration layer that processes rent across GoCardless, Stripe, and Akahu — and spent too long being the person founders came to when something broke. Papilio exists so that never has to be anyone's job again.
Veerain architected the infrastructure that makes Papilio work — the config runtime, the flow execution engine, the MCP server, the Lambda layer. He believes the best infrastructure is invisible: you configure it once and stop thinking about it.
Tawanda shapes how Papilio feels to use. His bar is simple: if a non-technical founder can't understand what's happening within ten seconds, it's not done yet. He's the reason the product feels as good as it works.
Thomas brings the financial and commercial rigour that a payments company needs. He understands the problems Papilio solves from the other side of the ledger — which keeps the product honest about what actually matters to the businesses using it.
Flatly is a New Zealand proptech that handles rent collection, landlord disbursements, and property payment management for flatmates across New Zealand. The payment infrastructure underneath it — GoCardless mandates, Stripe Connect, Akahu open banking, Xero exports, retry logic, state machines — is what became Papilio.