Lemonway

Payment infrastructure for platforms and marketplaces is a regulatory minefield. When money moves between multiple parties — a buyer, a seller, a marketplace taking a commission — the question of who is holding funds, for how long, and under what licence becomes surprisingly complex. Lemonway was founded in Paris in 2007 to solve exactly that problem. Its payment services platform is designed specifically for crowdfunding platforms, marketplaces, and platforms handling third-party funds — providing the payment accounts, KYC, and regulatory compliance infrastructure that these businesses need to operate legally across Europe. Lemonway holds a French payment institution licence that covers the European Economic Area, meaning platforms that integrate its API get a compliant payment infrastructure without needing their own licence. The company serves hundreds of platforms across Europe including real estate crowdfunding sites, donation platforms, and B2B marketplaces — invisible to end users but essential to the compliance architecture of the platforms they use. In the embedded finance landscape, Lemonway occupies a specific and defensible niche: compliance-heavy payment infrastructure for the platform economy, where the regulatory complexity is high enough that most platforms would rather outsource it than build it.