When a Shopify merchant in Madrid wakes up to a chargeback notice from Stripe or Adyen, the clock starts. Card networks give sellers a narrow window to respond, the evidence packet has to be assembled by hand, and most small operators simply eat the loss. Kloutit, a Barcelona seed-stage fintech founded in 2024, is selling those merchants a different default: an AI that ingests the dispute directly from the payment processor and drafts a personalized defense in under 30 seconds [EU-Startups, Dec 2024].
That speed claim is the wedge. Chargeback defense has historically been a services business, run by analysts inside acquirers or outsourced to specialist shops. Kloutit is betting that a software-only product, priced for the long tail of e-commerce, can compress the workflow into a single automated motion. The company describes itself as the first specialized tool with proprietary algorithms for fully automated AI-based chargeback defense [Cinco Días, Nov 2024], and its site pitches the same message in plainer terms: generate personalized defenses, recover revenue, get your team out of the dispute queue [Kloutit website, retrieved 2025].
The bet
Kloutit's product sits between the merchant and the payment processor. Chargebacks are detected and recorded instantly the moment they hit the processor [Kloutit website, retrieved 2026], which means the merchant does not have to monitor a separate dashboard or upload CSVs. The AI then assembles the response, pulling from order data, shipping records, and customer communications to build a case the issuer will accept. The pricing model is SaaS, the buyer is an e-commerce operator, and the value proposition is denominated in recovered revenue rather than seat licenses.
The category is crowded at the top. Chargeflow, Justt, and Chargebacks911 are all chasing the same thesis with deeper war chests, and each has spent years building integrations with the major processors and issuers. Kloutit's answer, for now, is geography and focus. The company is anchored in Spain, where local merchants want Spanish-language support and integrations tuned to European acquirers, and where the named competition has had less reason to invest.
Why it could be big
The macro shape is friendly. Card-not-present fraud has been climbing for a decade, and every uptick in fraud pressure produces a corresponding wave of chargebacks, many of them from legitimate buyers gaming the dispute system. Merchants lose twice: once on the refund, once on the network fees. Software that recovers even a fraction of those disputes pays for itself quickly, which is why the category has produced multiple venture-backed entrants in the United States and Israel.
Kloutit's seed cap table reads like a deliberate Spanish fintech build. The €540K round (roughly $568,000) was backed by Lanai Ventures and BStartup10, the early-stage program run by Banco Sabadell, alongside angels Axel Serena, Manuel Roca, Ricardo Fernandez, and Daniel Romy [Cinco Días, Dec 2024] [El Referente, Dec 2024]. Sabadell's involvement matters beyond the check: the bank sits close to the Iberian merchant base Kloutit is selling into, and BStartup10's portfolio has historically funneled into follow-on rounds from larger Spanish funds.
Seed round (USD) | 0.568 | $M
Disclosed customers (Feb 2026) | 190 | count
(Note: the two figures above are on different scales and shown only for reference; the seed is in millions of dollars, the customer count is a unit count.)
The team and traction
Kloutit was founded by Albert Algarra, Alexis Pairetti, and Adrián Algarra. Albert Algarra, the CEO, was previously Head at Stayforlong, the Barcelona-based travel booking company [Crunchbase, retrieved 2025], which gives him direct exposure to the operational headaches of high-volume online transactions. CTO Alexis Pairetti came from Basetis, where he worked as a senior fullstack analyst and developer [Crunchbase, retrieved 2025]. Adrián Algarra rounds out the founding team as CPO [LinkedIn, retrieved 2026].
The traction story has moved faster than the funding would suggest. Cinco Días reported in February 2026 that Kloutit had passed 190 e-commerce customers using its AI chargeback resolution product [Cinco Días, Feb 2026]. For a company that closed its first institutional round only fourteen months earlier on roughly $568,000, that is a real signal of product-market fit in the Spanish-speaking merchant base, and it suggests the sales motion is closer to self-serve than enterprise.
The honest counterfactual
The bear case is straightforward and worth naming. Chargeflow has raised substantially more capital, has direct integrations with Shopify and the major US processors, and is already the default recommendation in many English-language merchant communities. If chargeback defense becomes a winner-take-most category, a $568,000 seed round does not buy Kloutit much time to defend a global position [Cinco Días, Dec 2024]. The bull answer, supported by the 190-customer figure, is that the category may not consolidate globally at all. Payments are stubbornly regional, acquirer relationships are local, and a focused European player with Sabadell in its corner can compound inside a market the US-funded incumbents under-serve. The question is whether Kloutit can translate that early Iberian wedge into a Series A thesis before the larger players notice.
What to watch
The next twelve months will turn on two things. First, a Series A. The 190-customer milestone is the kind of proof point that should attract a Spanish or pan-European fund willing to write a €3M to €5M ticket, and the timing of that round will say a lot about how investors are pricing the category outside the US. Second, processor integrations. Kloutit's instant-detection claim only holds up if it keeps adding direct connections to the acquirers and gateways European merchants actually use. Land Adyen, Redsys, and a couple of major Shopify Payments flows, and the moat starts to look real.
So here is the question for the reader: in a category where the largest player has raised more than fifty times Kloutit's seed, does regional depth in Spanish e-commerce beat global breadth, or does it just delay the same competitive collision by eighteen months?
Cash Quintero