Creem raises 5 million euros to be the seller of record for small software teams

Creem, a Tallinn company that sells billing and tax handling to software businesses, has raised 5 million euros in a seed round led by Inovo VC. Practica Capital and Antler, both investors in its 2025 pre-seed, returned for the round, alongside angels including Markus Villig of Bolt and Timmu Tõke and Kaspar Tiri of Ready Player Me. The company says annual recurring revenue has passed 2 million euros and more than doubled since that earlier round.

The sum is modest by the standard of the region's headline deals. The business is worth understanding, because Creem sells the least glamorous part of running an internet company: the seller's paperwork. It is a merchant of record, which means its customers are never the legal seller at all.

The seller on the invoice is the platform, not the founder

The model is easier to describe than to operate. A merchant of record is the legal seller on the invoice. The customer pays Creem, Creem pays the founder, and any tax authority deals with Creem rather than with a two-person team in Tartu or Kaunas. What the company says it handles on every sale:

• Payments by card, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay, charged in the customer's own currency.
• VAT, GST and sales tax calculated, collected, filed and remitted, which the company says removes the need for a founder to register for tax in a country they have never visited.
• A compliant invoice for each transaction, plus fraud screening and liability for chargebacks.
• Payouts to a bank account or a crypto wallet, processed on the 1st and 15th of each month.

The appeal is obvious to anyone who has sold a monthly subscription into twenty countries and then tried to work out what is owed where. The alternative is an accountant in each jurisdiction, or a decision not to sell into some of them at all, and plenty of small teams make one of the two.

One rate, and a comparison the company wrote itself

Creem charges a single rate of 3.9 per cent of the sale plus 40 US cents, with no monthly fee and no setup fee. On a sale of 100 dollars, the company's worked example deducts 3.90 dollars and the fixed 40 cents, leaving 95.70 dollars.

The comparison it publishes is with the headline rates of four competing providers, using its own assumptions and a 50 dollar average order value:

• Creem at 3.9 per cent plus 40 US cents per transaction.
• Paddle at 5 per cent plus 50 US cents.
• Lemon Squeezy at 7 per cent plus 50 US cents.
• Gumroad at 10 per cent with no fixed fee.

Those are the company's own figures on its own calculator. The page states that the estimates assume international subscriptions paid with premium cards, and that actual fees depend on the sales mix. It also lists stablecoin payouts as built in, which is the part of the fee schedule that determines what a founder can actually do with the money.

The pages disagree about how much tax is covered

The softest number is the one the whole pitch rests on. How much of the world's tax Creem handles depends on which of its pages a reader opens.

• The home page says taxes and compliance are handled across 190 or more countries, and describes VAT, GST and sales tax as calculated, collected, filed and remitted across the same span.
• The pricing page says automatic collection and remittance in 50 or more countries.
• The developer documentation says 190 or more countries, then narrows to something a reader can check: 28 or more US states, the European Union through the Estonian one stop shop, the United Kingdom and South Korea, followed by the words and growing.

Only the third description can be tested, and it is the smallest of the three. A founder buying a merchant of record is buying the tax registrations they do not want to do themselves, so the distance between 50 countries and 190 is the distance between a commitment and a category. No list of jurisdictions is published.

Teams of five now build what used to need an org chart

The argument for the round is about who the customer is becoming, and the investor states it more plainly than the company does.

Creem's product direction points the same way. Its billing features cover products charged by the unit as well as by the seat, with credit wallets, usage-based pricing and meters that count tokens, images or API calls. The platform is also designed to be driven by an agent: the documentation offers a skill file and a server that let a coding assistant create products, open checkouts and watch for failed renewals without anyone opening a dashboard.

The money is for agents, not for another dashboard

The company describes three uses for the round, over the next 12 to 18 months.

• Creem 2.0, which it says expands beyond the standard merchant-of-record model to cover affiliate management, revenue splits, conversion analytics, short links, marketing channel tracking and abandoned cart recovery.
• Agent-run billing, where a store is set up, monitored and optimised with limited human input.
• Compliance and payout infrastructure across both card and stablecoin rails.

Creem was founded by Gabriel Ferraz and Alec Erasmus, both with backgrounds at Google and Adyen. The site attributes the business to Armitage Labs OÜ. Creem is not in our directory, and this article rests on the company's own pages and on ArcticStartup's report rather than on a directory profile.

What to watch

• Whether the tax coverage claim settles on one number. A published list of the jurisdictions where Creem files its returns would make the largest claim on the site checkable as well as quotable.
• Whether the fee holds. 3.9 per cent plus 40 US cents is the lowest headline rate on the company's own comparison table, and price is the first thing that moves when a category fills up.
• Whether any customer above the indie tier appears. The testimonials the company publishes are solo founders and small teams, which fits the pitch and leaves the enterprise question open.
• Whether revenue splits replace share options at the companies Creem serves. That is the Inovo thesis, and the only way to test it is to watch how those teams pay the people who join them.
• Whether stablecoin payouts are explained. Paying a founder in tokens is listed as a feature, and the rules that govern it are not stated on any page we could find.

A merchant of record is a small business built on a large irritation. Nobody who writes software for a living wants to file tax returns in countries they have never seen, and the pitch is that the irritation grows as the teams get smaller. The round is a wager that the smallest software companies will buy their way out of their own paperwork rather than learn to enjoy it. The number to hold Creem to is not the 5 million euros. It is the 190 countries, which its own pages cannot yet agree on.