Less than a day after an eight-hour operation on his spine, Hiroki Takeuchi joined a GoCardless board call and told the directors he would be back to run the company. It was September 2016. Three weeks after his wedding, on a routine ride around Regent’s Park with his brother before work, he had collided with a car and been left paralysed from the chest down.

He did come back. Ten years later he is still chief executive of the payments company he co-founded in 2011, and this autumn he took it through two very different milestones in the same month: a sale to Mollie and what GoCardless calls the UK’s first live agentic bank payment.

An Oxford mathematician with no payments experience

Hiroki Takeuchi studied mathematics at Oxford, where he was vice president of the Oxford Entrepreneurs society, then joined McKinsey as a business analyst. Two friends, Matt Robinson and Tom Blomfield, became his co-founders; he had worked alongside Robinson at McKinsey. In 2011 the three joined Y Combinator’s summer batch with an idea for group payments.

Hiroki Takeuchi is frank about how little they knew. “We had no experience in payments whatsoever,” he told Open Banking Tracker in 2021. What they had was a belief that the plumbing of payments had not been built for the internet. The idea soon widened from group payments to helping any business get paid, starting with recurring payments over the UK’s Direct Debit system, and the mission became taking the pain out of getting paid. He counts an early decision to build an API, so that software such as Xero, QuickBooks, Zuora and Salesforce could plug GoCardless in, among the ones that shaped the company.

The last founder standing

Founding teams rarely stay intact, and this one didn’t. Blomfield left in late 2013 and went on to co-found Monzo. In March 2015 TechCrunch reported that Robinson was also leaving to start another company, while keeping his board seat. That left Hiroki Takeuchi as the only one of the three still at GoCardless, running it as chief executive. Robinson later co-founded Nested, and Takeuchi has said the three remain close.

He has been open about what he found hard. He never really appreciated, he said, that starting a business meant leading people, and moving from a founder working among peers to the chief executive of a much larger company was very challenging.

The autumn that changed the job

The accident happened on 22 September 2016. The surgery was meant to straighten his spine, not to restore walking. In October an MRSA infection meant another operation. On 22 October he moved to a spinal rehabilitation unit at The Wellington in north London, treated rehab as a full-time job and set himself a six-week target. He was discharged on 16 December, about seven weeks later, when six to twelve months is typical. In between, he gave a speech from his chair at the company Christmas party.

Robinson stepped back in to run GoCardless while he recovered, then handed management back in early 2017, and the business kept growing in his absence. Talking to TechCrunch in September 2017, Hiroki Takeuchi said: “I still feel like I’m the same person as I used to be. Not all of the time, but most of the time.” He said the accident could turn out to be a net positive, because it made him look at the company with fresh eyes. In 2023 he told Tech.eu it had shown him he was quite resilient, and that he had by then run GoCardless for longer since the accident than before it.

Building GoCardless for the long haul

The bets that followed were on open banking. Bain Capital Ventures led a $95 million Series F in December 2020, and in February 2022 Permira led a Series G of more than $312 million, with BlackRock Private Equity Partners joining, at a valuation reported at around $2 billion. GoCardless bought the Latvian open banking provider Nordigen in 2022 and Sentenial, which trades as Nuapay, in 2024.

Growth brought its own lesson. By 2023, Hiroki Takeuchi acknowledged, the company had been growing its cost base faster than its revenue base. It cut about 17 per cent of its staff that summer and set out to drive more accountability and be more ruthless about stopping things that weren’t working. Between April and June 2025, GoCardless recorded its first EBITDA-positive quarter on an adjusted basis.

How Hiroki Takeuchi thinks about the long game

Hiroki Takeuchi’s advice to founders is mostly about patience. Don’t underestimate the length of the journey, he says, and be in it for the journey itself; part of the fun for him is not knowing where it is going. On diversity, he told Tech.eu in 2023 that superficial measures matter less to him than differences of experience and ways of thinking around the table, which he believes lead to better outcomes. And he has a sense of humour about the hours. In 2023, with a one-year-old who woke between 4.30 and 5.30 every morning, he joked that work had become the relaxing part of his day.

The same long view runs through the deal that closed this year. In December 2025 Mollie agreed to buy GoCardless for €1.05 billion, mostly in shares, and Takeuchi called it a win for European fintech. The deal completed on 1 September 2026. Mollie’s chief executive, Koen Köppen, leads the combined group, which serves more than 350,000 businesses, while GoCardless keeps its own brand as “GoCardless, a Mollie company”, led by Hiroki Takeuchi.

What to Watch Next for Hiroki Takeuchi and GoCardless

Three weeks after the deal closed, GoCardless processed what it says was the UK’s first live agentic bank payment: a monthly donation to the anti-poverty charity Trussell, set up entirely inside a conversation with an AI agent and built within the FCA’s AI Live Testing programme. Fintechbits covered the Trussell payment at the time. “We’ve long argued that account-to-account payments are the natural foundation for agentic commerce,” Hiroki Takeuchi said.

For anyone still asking what agentic payments are, the next question is whether GoCardless can take that single charity donation and make it routine across Mollie’s merchants. The other thing to watch is the FY26 accounts. Hiroki Takeuchi said in April that GoCardless was on track for its first profitable year on an adjusted basis in the year to June 2026, and those figures will show whether the founder who stayed has delivered it.

Questions about Hiroki Takeuchi and GoCardless

Who is Hiroki Takeuchi?

Hiroki Takeuchi is the co-founder and chief executive of GoCardless, the London bank payments company now part of Mollie. He studied mathematics at Oxford, worked at McKinsey and co-founded GoCardless through Y Combinator’s summer 2011 batch.

Who owns GoCardless?

Mollie. It agreed to buy GoCardless for €1.05 billion, mostly in shares, in December 2025 and completed the deal on 1 September 2026. GoCardless operates as “GoCardless, a Mollie company”, led by Hiroki Takeuchi, while Mollie’s chief executive, Koen Köppen, leads the combined group.

What happened to Hiroki Takeuchi in 2016?

On 22 September 2016 he collided with a car while cycling around Regent’s Park and was left paralysed from the chest down. He was discharged from rehabilitation about seven weeks later, and management of GoCardless was handed back to him in early 2017.

What was GoCardless’s first agentic payment?

In September 2026 GoCardless processed what it says was the UK’s first live agentic bank payment: a monthly donation to the charity Trussell, set up entirely inside a conversation with an AI agent and built within the FCA’s AI Live Testing programme.