Hristo Borisov is co-founder and chief executive of Payhawk, the spend management company that combines company cards, expenses, payments, and accounting prep in one product. He started it in 2018 in Sofia after eleven years at the software maker Telerik.
From a Student Job to Telerik’s Product Team
Borisov studied computer science and business administration at the American University in Bulgaria. While still a student he began as a software developer at Telerik, a company started by alumni of the same school, and he stayed for more than eleven years. By the time he left he led the product development team of more than 180 engineers behind some of the company’s award-winning products. Progress Software bought Telerik in 2014 for $263 million.
Working inside fast-growing software companies, he was struck by how manual and slow the expense process was for accountants. That mismatch is the problem he went looking for when he left.
Starting Payhawk
He founded Payhawk in 2018 with Boyko Karadzhov, a colleague of many years. The founders did not begin with a fixed product. They ran a series of design sprints and customer interviews until one idea about company cards and automatic expense collection resonated. It went from idea to a working product with paying customers in six months, and a €500,000 seed round followed. The company won a startup competition run by Wirecard and Visa among 50 companies from 18 countries and was recognized at the Paris Fintech Forum in January 2019.
Growing Into a Unicorn
Payhawk became the first Bulgarian unicorn in March 2022, and in July 2026 it passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue. It now serves more than 6,000 customers and competes with Spendesk, Pleo, and Procurify.
The idea he and his co-founders landed on in 2018, that a fast-growing company should not run its expenses by hand, is now the product thousands of finance teams use every day.
