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,” Lamprou told TechCrunch. So she thought, 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. Europe was less of a focus. Shop Pay, for example, launched in 2014 and has raised a total of $982.1 million. So what did Lamprou plan to do with her little startup, which she called Simpler?

She hired two friends from college, Alex Kyriakopoulos and Spyros Mandekis, started building a team, and they managed to raise an initial amount of $1 million in a pre-seed round.

Simpler now has more than 250 merchants, more than half a million registered customers, and expects to grow revenue 10x by the end of 2025, Lamprou said. It also recently raised €9 million (about $10 million) in a pre-series A round to double in the U.K., Italy, and Spain. VentureFriends, MMC Ventures, and Lamda Development participated in the round.

“Yes, Bolt is a big, huge company, but it’s focused on the U.S., mostly on handling fraud issues like chargebacks. That’s a very big problem in the U.S., but not so much in Europe,” she said.

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 sales grew by 66% between 2019 and 2021. Despite a 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 outsource payments, shipping, and loyalty programs to a single system, which the company says increases conversions and reduces complexity. For shoppers, it means a one-click shopping experience across multiple stores and channels.

“We see strong demand from both small and medium-sized enterprises and large enterprises,” she added.

While Shop Pay is exclusive to Shopify, Simpler is designed for all platforms. And unlike Bolt, which is focused primarily on the US market, Simpler is aimed at the UK and Europe.

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