Paddle: Two Teenagers Who Built a £1B SaaS Company

This is the story of Christian Owens and Harrison Rose, who founded Paddle at seventeen, pivoted from a marketplace that made £800 in its first two months, and built the UK's leading payments infrastructure for software companies, processing billions in revenue for thousands of SaaS businesses worldwide.

Christian Owens: The Kid Who Taught Himself Everything

Christian Owens is a boy from Corby in Northamptonshire. Corby is an ex-steel town in the East Midlands and not the sort of place where tech hubs, or startups, can be said to exist, and indeed, not a place whose name is likely to roll off the tongues of the vast majority of people working in tech.

He didn't have what almost any other founder would have been expected to have- no upper-class connections, no privileged education, no direct route into tech; his route in was via a computer, a cheap broadband connection, and too much energy to get through school.

By the time he was 12, he was already going into businesses in his native Corby to offer them a website, starting with a local Indian restaurant. By 13, he was already learning how to code; by 14, a client wanted an invoice, and he had nothing to give them. He looked up an invoice on Google and saw that software existed for it, but the service that he wanted would have set him back £8 a month. Without a second thought, and with a natural aversion to spending money when he felt there was a better way of getting a service that he required without having to pay, he wrote his own.

It is a single small detail that illustrates perfectly how Christian Owens' mind worked. The most obvious way for him to proceed would have been to pay for software. Still, his instinctive first response was to build the software himself, not because he could not afford to pay for it but because it would have been a far more enjoyable way of achieving his objective.

By fifteen, he had packaged the invoicing tool with several other Mac applications and launched a bundle sold online. Inspired by Groupon, his business model was built around aggregation. He built a subscriber list of 250,000 people without having a single subscriber on day one by persuading other software providers to share it with their audiences. On launch week, the bundle generated nearly £300,000 in sales.

He was fifteen years old.

He then made a proposition to his parents. School wasn't a good fit for him, he explained; he wanted to leave. Their reaction was measured in a way only parents who have witnessed their children achieve something exceptional can be; they agreed to let him leave if he could make £100,000 in sales from this project by the time he turned 16.

He did it. He left school at the age of 16.

Harrison Rose: The A-Level Results He Never Read

The story of Harrison Rose started on a single day in August 2012.

He had taken his A-levels, and his results day had arrived. He had driven to his school, been handed his envelope, and had ripped it open in the school car park. He has never revealed the results in this envelope. He has, however, revealed that the results never left that car. He drove directly from the school car park to Paddle's first office in Corby.

He was eighteen. He had been accepted into university. He never turned up.

Harrison had met Christian through the intertwined world of small software businesses and the internet communities around them. While Christian had been the engineer and the product builder, Harrison had been the commercial head. He had thought about customers, markets, and revenue in the way Christian had about systems and code. They had been a natural fit from the start.

Driving from school to his office on results day was no random decision. He and Christian had been working on the idea of Paddle already. University was the path that everyone else expected him to take. He had looked at that path and decided to forge his own alternative route.

"I can truthfully state my exam results never left that car, the car I have since sold," he has since written, "Now, ten years on, Paddle employs hundreds of people globally."

He had made his decision and never looked back.

The First Idea That Made £800 in Two Months

The company that Christian and Harrison started in 2012 was not Paddle as it is today.

The plan was audacious, the way that only teenagers who have yet to learn to fear and doubt can be audacious: Amazon for software, where anybody can find, buy, and sell software, and Paddle takes a share of everything that happens.

They raised seed investment. They leased a tiny office in Corby. They went to work in the office of their first investor, Mark Pearson, the founder of MyVoucherCodes, and built a first version of the marketplace and launched it in 2013.

It did £842 in the first two months. Christian summed it up: "We could have sold more software door to door than we did on this website".

However, despite the failure, something was occurring inside the ruins of the marketplace. Customers were not using the site the way they intended. Instead, they were completely bypassing the consumer storefront in the marketplace and were hacking into the checkout and billing functionality directly underneath. Customers did not want the marketplace; they wanted the backend: the checkout page, subscriptions, taxes, and payments. Customers were telling them what to build, and Christian and Harrison were paying attention to hear them.

They threw out 90% of the product and kept the infrastructure.

They rebooted Paddle as a pure payments and billing platform for SaaS companies, that would handle all the things that a software company needed to sell abroad without actually building or managing any of it. It is the same logic that saved every company in this list of stories. The best founders don't fall in love with their idea; they fall in love with the problem. When their solution isn't working, they find a new solution that IS working, and pursue it. As demonstrated by the story of Loom, which nearly went bankrupt but survived, and then survived again, the pivot IS the founding moment.

The Problem They Were Actually Solving

To understand why Paddle stuck, you need to understand what selling software abroad actually looked like before there was Paddle. A software founder in London who wants to sell to Germany, Japan, and the United States has a variety of problems to overcome, which have absolutely nothing to do with the quality of the software. They have to understand the tax requirements of selling in every European country to avoid fines associated with VAT, every state in America, and deal with the complexities of foreign exchange, different pricing per country, payment failures, automatic renewals, refunds, and chargebacks. Depending on the country, some need a legal entity to accept payments. None of this has anything to do with actually building software. It has everything to do with stealing the time they should be using to build and improve the product.

Christian was intimately familiar with this. He'd dealt with these problems at age 14 when he was building software in Corby and trying to sell to users in a number of foreign countries that he'd never set foot in. This friction wasn't abstract; it was the particular and frustrating reality of having successfully built something people want and being completely unable to sell it to them effectively because of an administrative overhead beyond his personal control. Paddle's solution was to be what's called a "Merchant of Record." Instead of accepting payments on behalf of the software company, Paddle bought the software, thus it became the legal seller of the product. A purchase made on a Paddle-powered checkout was essentially a transaction from Paddle to the end customer, and the software company received the revenue, minus Paddle's cut, from Paddle, rather than from the end customer.

For a software company, this was a huge deal. It removed all complexity, and a founder builds the software, and Paddle handles the rest. The actual business model isn't new; Apple has been doing this for years for its app store. But Paddle democratized the arrangement for independent software companies that didn't want to use the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store. Infrastructure previously limited to large companies with the resources to navigate the walled gardens was now open to everyone.

From £842 to £10 Million ARR: The Cold Emails That Built a Company.

Post-pivot, Christian and Harrison did not build a sales team; they were the sales team.

They created internal tools that would crawl a software company's public checkout page and detect specific issues: that tax rates were applied incorrectly to Europeans, that currency options were missing, that checkout flows were not localized for markets other than their own. They then sent personalized cold emails to every prospect explaining the precise issue on the prospect's checkout page and how Paddle solved it.

These were not the generic outreach emails that many find so annoying-each one proved that the sender had actually visited the recipient's actual product and noticed an actual, specific issue. The response rate was strong because there was no doubt about its relevance.

Christian and Harrison scaled Paddle to $10M+ in annual recurring revenue and 140 employees, almost entirely through this founder-led sales approach without a traditional enterprise sales org. It was the same principle Christian had followed since age twelve: find the problem, solve it specifically, and show your work.

The growth attracted significant capital: Notion Capital funded Paddle's Series B in 2017, and FTV Capital and 83North led their Series C in 2020. In May 2022, KKR led Paddle's Series D at $1.4 billion, turning the company into a unicorn ten years after two teenagers launched it out of an office in Corby.

The £200 Million Acquisition That Expanded the Platform

Just a month after its Series D, in May 2022, Paddle also announced the acquisition of ProfitWell for roughly $200m.

ProfitWell is a revenue analytics and subscription intelligence platform that helps thousands of SaaS businesses track, benchmark, and reduce churn. Where Paddle would provide the infrastructure for a customer to get paid, ProfitWell would provide the intelligence to understand what money it got back.

The marriage was logical. Paddle already knew more about a SaaS business's revenue than most any other company because it was facilitating its payment. ProfitWell took those raw transaction data points and turned them into an intelligent picture of a business's revenue performance. Coupled together, they would give a SaaS business not just the ability to receive payments but to understand and optimize how they performed.

The deal also gave Paddle an instant presence in the US, where ProfitWell has its roots. Paddle has traditionally performed better in Europe, and ProfitWell tipped the balance.

The Transition: When the Founder Steps Back

Christian Owens resigned from his position as Paddle CEO in April 2023 to move into an executive role and take on a new hire to manage the next phase of growth for a company he built from a spare room in Corby into a multi-billion-dollar business. He was 30.

It demonstrated something that any completely self-aware founder comes to know: the skills necessary to build a company from nothing aren't necessarily the skills necessary to build beyond a specific threshold. Christian had been building things his entire life, from when he was twelve. The managerial demands of managing four hundred people in the company while competing against Stripe required a different leadership style from the founder-led sales motion, which had grown the company to $10m of ARR.

Harrison Rose had already transitioned from an active day-to-day role to a position where he was acting more in an advisory capacity and eventually joining Notion Capital. It was precisely the same VC firm that had provided Paddle's Series B round as venture partner, bringing what one might expect from a founder who had taken a company from a school car park to a unicorn: a practitioner's knowledge of what building really feels like from the inside.

The FTC Fine and a Recent Challenge

In June 2025, Paddle received $5 million in penalties from the US Federal Trade Commission. The penalty related to claims that Paddle had helped some of its merchants engage in deceptive subscription services, such as assisting businesses that made cancelling a subscription difficult, and charging people for a repeating subscription that they had not clearly agreed to. The company denied that it had helped merchants mislead their customers. Still, it paid the penalty and announced that it had implemented a more rigorous vetting of merchants, as well as consumer safeguards, that it did not already have in place.

The episode served as a useful reminder of the regulatory risks embedded in a Merchant of Record structure; in that structure, Paddle, by being at the heart of the chain of commercial liability for the transaction, does not get away lightly. It was embarrassing for the company, which is otherwise proud to present itself as a loyal helper of software founders, and the long-term implications will depend on the response.

Where Paddle Stands in 2026

Paddle now processes payments for thousands of software companies around the world in over 200 countries and territories. It now generates around $90M ARR and has steadily increased from $76M in 2023. In total, Paddle has raised $293M through 7 rounds and employs roughly 395 people.

In July 2025, Paddle took an additional $25M in equity and $318M in debt funding, as confirmation that the growth market is still receptive to funding, and that the banks still believe the product they created will produce recurring cash streams. Enterprise customers now consist of Verizon, Fortinet, and ServiceNow, which seems very far from the independent software developers that Paddle initially processed payments for.

The platform's focus expanded to companies of all sizes after its launch, which focused on independent software developers: a sole founder managing a subscription newsletter, all the way up to multinational enterprises handling their software licenses globally. The Merchant of Record model, which Christian and Harrison came up with after the collapse of their marketplace, became the de facto method for any serious software company to manage their international payments. Stripe, the highest-valued private fintech company, has since come out with their own version of this feature that, in all likelihood, reflects a confirmation of the method that Paddle invented.

What Christian and Harrison's Story Teaches Every Founder

Two teenagers from Corby set up a business, and one of the most powerful payment processors in the world decided that the only way to compete was to attack them. That is not a fortunate coincidence. It is the result of solving a real problem, weathering the failure of your first product, and solving something that really helped a group of people who needed it desperately.

The first takeaway is that building for personal experience is critical. Christian did not sit and analyze the global SaaS payment market, then spot a whitespace. He experienced it first-hand – he was a teenage programmer trying to sell things across countries, and was deeply frustrated with the friction involved. His first-hand knowledge of the problem allowed for a sharp, focused solution – the same underlying principle that has fueled all great companies in this space, whether the education problem that Euan Blair and Sophie Adelman sought to address with Multiverse, or the security systems Eoin Hinchy fought to change from the inside for fifteen years with Tines.

The second is the importance of listening to your customers, more than to your original ideas. The market mechanism wasn't working. The underlying checkout infrastructure was, however, and people were hacking it to access. Christian and Harrison discarded ninety percent of what they built to rebuild around that ten percent that had value, a level of separation that most founders find impossible, yet these two did at nineteen.

The third lesson is the use of the founder-led sales motion as a product development tool. Through the use of individually crafted cold emails that sought to understand what specific issues were plaguing a prospect's checkout page, they weren't simply selling; they were learning. Positive or negative responses offered further insights into market demand, the sales call being essentially their research period. By the time they hired their first salesperson, their customer understanding far exceeded that of anyone they could have hired.

Final Thought: The School Car Park That Changed Everything

Harrison Rose collected his A-levels and drove to his first day working in a car park. His results never left the car.

Christian Owens promised his parents when he was 14 that without them, he could make 100,000 a year. He did.

Neither man did what was expected. Neither man had to.

They grew Paddle from a marketplace failure that was bringing in £842 a month into a business that turns over billions of pounds a year on software revenue alone. It was cold emails, practical experience, and a drive to ditch anything that wasn't good enough, then starting again, from scratch, with what works.

The road to a billion-pound company from Corby wasn't a straight one. None of them is. But for two teenage boys who never went to college, it was the perfect road to take.