Pomelo Pay Raises £1.1M to Enable Contactless Payments for Any Business via Smartphone

Pomelo Pay, a UK fintech company, has raised £1.1 million to develop its mobile payment processing application. The company enables businesses to accept contactless card and smartphone payments directly through a standard iOS or Android device — turning any business phone into a point-of-sale terminal without requiring the purchase, setup, or monthly rental of dedicated card reader hardware.

The ability to accept card payments has historically required either a fixed card terminal (tied to a specific location and requiring a merchant services account) or a mobile card reader attached to a smartphone — both involving hardware purchases or rentals, setup processes, and ongoing fees. For the categories of small business where card payment acceptance would be most transformative — market traders, mobile tradespeople, pop-up businesses, sole traders, event vendors — the barriers of hardware cost and merchant account setup have been sufficient to keep many operating cash-only, despite the well-documented commercial benefit of accepting cards.

Recent changes to payment technology standards — particularly the development of software-only tap-to-pay solutions that use a smartphone's NFC chip to read contactless cards and devices without a separate piece of hardware — have made it technically possible to accept contactless payments through an app alone. Pomelo Pay is building a UK implementation of this capability, allowing any business with a smartphone to begin accepting card payments within minutes of download — with no hardware to purchase, no terminal to carry, and no monthly rental. The app handles the payment processing, provides receipts, and manages the settlement of funds to the merchant's account.

The funding will be used to develop the payment application, obtain the necessary payment industry certifications, and build the distribution and marketing needed to grow the merchant user base across UK small businesses and sole traders.

Sources

• Crunchbase — Pomelo Pay company profile