She sat down during the COVID lockdown and started coding — now she’s taking on Bolt

Sitting in Athens during the first Covid-19 lockdown, entrepreneur Rania Lamprou watched online e-commerce explode due to social distancing. But merchants still struggled with low conversion rates because their checkout processes were complicated and they had to integrate multiple payment, shipping, and loyalty providers. “I knew there had to be a better way to reduce friction for both merchants and customers,” she told Techcrunch. Why not transform the checkout process into a Checkout-as-a-Service platform that would streamline it for both merchants and buyers? She started coding in Python.

But she wasn’t alone. Tech giants Shop Pay and Bolt were operating in the same space, but focused on the U.S. market, less on Europe. The former launched in 2014 and raised a combined $982.1 million. So what did Lamprou plan to do with her little startup, which she called Simpler?

She hired two co-founders she knew from college—Alex Kyriakopoulos and Spyros Mandekis—and began building a team that raised an initial round of $1 million in pre-seed funding.

“Yes, Bolt is a big, huge company, yes. But they are focused on the US, mainly on handling fraud issues like chargebacks, which is a very big problem in the US, but not as big in Europe,” she told TechCrunch in a phone interview.

In Europe, she said, there are different problems: “We have to localize and add all these different solutions, different providers. Each country has different needs, customer preferences, different payment providers, loyalty coupons, etc.”

This is significant because European e-commerce saw sales grow by 66% between 2019 and 2021. Despite the temporary decline, the market is expected to continue to grow, potentially reaching $955 billion by 2028.

The solution turned out to be elegant.

With Simpler, merchants can fully outsource payments, shipping, and loyalty programs into one system, increasing conversions and reducing complexity. For shoppers, this means a one-click shopping experience across multiple stores and channels, literally simplifying the shopping experience.

Simpler is a minimal-code or no-code solution that integrates quickly, giving customers the convenience of one-click shopping across multiple retailers and channels.

Now, Simpler has more than 250 sellers, more than half a million registered buyers, and expects to grow revenue 10x by the end of 2025, Lamprou said. It also raised €9 million/$10 million in late seed/pre-Series A, doubling in the U.K., Italy, and Spain. VentureFriends, MMC Ventures, and Lamda Development participated in the round.

“As we expand our operations across Europe, we are seeing strong demand from both small and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises,” she added.

While Shop Pay is exclusive to Shopify, Simpler is designed for all platforms. And unlike Bolt, which focuses primarily on the US market, Simpler is targeting the UK and Europe, adapting its approach to the unique needs of those markets.

“We created a robust, end-to-end solution for three orders of magnitude less money than Bolt,” she added with a faint smile.