Viva Wallet
Athens, Greece · StartupViva Wallet is an Athens-based neobank and acquiring bank that built Europe's first fully cloud-native card-acquiring platform, running on Microsoft Azure and designed from day one for SoftPOS and ISO-independent merchant onboarding. The company serves small and medium merchants across 24 European countries with Android-based payment terminals, e-commerce gateways, IBAN accounts, instant settlement, and merchant cash advance products, and crossed 500,000 merchants before the JPMorgan Chase acquisition closed. JPMorgan bought a majority stake in 2022 valuing Viva Wallet at around USD 2 billion, specifically to use its cloud-native acquiring stack as the base for Chase's own European merchant-services expansion — one of the largest strategic tech acquisitions ever done out of Greece. Founded by Haris Karonis, Viva is today the anchor of the Athenian fintech cluster and proof that payments infrastructure of global quality can be built outside of London, Amsterdam, and Stockholm.