Helcim
“Can a transparent, interchange-plus payment processor become the affordable payments OS for North American SMBs and software platforms?”
Founded in 2008 in Calgary, Helcim built its identity as a transparent, merchant-friendly payment processor offering interchange-plus pricing to SMBs — competing with flat-rate incumbents like Square and Stripe on cost. Over time it expanded from pure payment processing into a broader commerce OS for small businesses, adding invoicing, online store builder, recurring billing, card vault, virtual terminal, and POS functionality. More recently it has leaned into an embedded payments proposition (HelcimPay.js, developer API) aimed at software platforms, positioning itself as an affordable acquiring and payments-infrastructure layer for vertical SaaS and marketplace builders.