When Eyal Nevo describes the origin of Orchestra Solutions, he doesn’t reach for the usual founder mythology. There’s no garage, no whiteboard epiphany, no grand thesis about disrupting an industry. Instead, there’s an online faxing service.

“As a team, we’ve been all working together for longer than I want to admit,” Nevo says. More than 15 years, in fact. And it was that faxing business – about as far from cutting-edge fintech as you can get – that pulled them into the world of PCI compliance, security, and credit card handling. Once there, they noticed something: moving credit card data from one company to another was a mess, especially in the travel industry. So they built a tokenization service to fix it.

Solving one problem revealed the next. Once you’re holding credit cards, the logical step is to charge them. But connecting to payment gateways, Nevo and his team discovered, was “difficult and cumbersome,” and maintaining all those connections was harder still. So they built what they proudly called a “universal payment gateway.”

Then Covid hit. By this point faxing was long behind them; the company had become a payments operation, helping businesses wrestle their credit card and processing challenges into shape. Most of their customers were in travel – an industry that, almost overnight, fell off a cliff. Forced to reinvent themselves, the team went looking for new ground and stumbled onto something unexpected: an entire category had emerged around exactly what they’d already built. It was called payment orchestration.

“We realized that basically we had all the components,” Nevo says. “Just not the name.” They wrapped those components into a single product and rebranded as Orchestra.

In other words, they arrived early at a market that the rest of the industry was only beginning to name.

Small by Design

The most counterintuitive thing about Orchestra has nothing to do with its origin story. It’s the size of the team running it.

In an industry that equates scale with headcount, Orchestra stays deliberately small – and treats that as a feature, not a constraint. “Everything was built around the concept that we’re a small team,” Nevo explains. The company runs fully in the cloud, automates aggressively, and engineers for reliability and simplicity so that very little requires manual upkeep.

The payoff lands directly on the customer. There are dedicated salespeople and dedicated support staff, and the path to an answer is short. “Customers can always get to the right person,” Nevo says. “It’s very short steps to get to the CEO level even.” No phone-tree purgatory, no escalation queue – just the person who actually knows.

That structure also explains the company’s unusually durable relationships, both with clients and with its own people. The trick to keeping a small team energized, Nevo says, is simple: keep it interesting. “Constantly changing and adapting and constantly having new ideas and new tasks and new projects and new challenges.” Because everyone is involved in everything, “the success of the company is the success of everyone involved.”

The Obvious Objection – And the Answer

A small team invites an obvious question, and Nevo hears it often: What happens when a big customer shows up?

His answer is in the architecture. A single JavaScript library connects to more than 100 payment providers – processors, gateways, and alternative payment methods – through one integration, so customers build the connection once instead of maintaining a separate one for every provider. New connections can be added in weeks, not the months competitors often need. Frequently, Nevo says, the team has a requested processor ready before the customer has even finished evaluating Orchestra, let alone completed their own integration. Expansion, by design, means tying in a new component – not rebuilding the system underneath it.

And the catalog keeps growing. If a customer needs a provider Orchestra doesn’t yet support, the team adds it – at no extra cost – which is the same listen-and-build approach Nevo describes everywhere else. A hundred providers is where Orchestra is today, not where it stops.

The AI Decision Nobody Else Is Making

Then there’s the bet that most clearly separates Orchestra from its competitors: the company has deliberately kept AI out of its product.

In a market racing to embed intelligence into every product it touches, that sounds almost heretical. But Nevo’s reasoning is consistent with everything else about the company. “We’re trying to make a product that doesn’t tell customers what to do,” he says. His clients are businesses that understand their own risk and their own goals. Orchestra has no interest in overriding that judgment with its own.

So the system facilitates the infrastructure around payments – not the decisions. If a customer wants to run their payment data through an AI model, Orchestra hands over every input and every data point they need. But the logic stays where Nevo believes it belongs: with the customer.

“That’s one of the differentiations between us and our competitors,” he says. “We allow full flexibility to our customers to do whatever they want.” No customer is ever told, in effect, you’re configured to do it this way and your options are limited to these.

He takes the same approach to the industry’s loudest current obsession: agentic AI and AI-driven commerce. Nevo is openly unsure whether it’s substance or hype – “I have my concerns on that” – but Orchestra is prepared either way, with mechanisms in place to support merchants moving toward agentic commerce. The philosophy, as he frames it, is direction over prediction. “We’re not trying to teach the market. We tend to listen to our customers and we build according to what they need.”

The Patchwork Problem

Talk to enough product and engineering teams and a familiar pattern emerges, one Nevo has seen many times. A platform starts processing payments in its home region and solves that problem. Then it expands into a new market and solves that one. Then another. Each fix is sensible in isolation. Strung together, they become a liability.

“Eventually you get to a point where it’s a patchwork,” Nevo says – four or five payment connections “all haphazardly running together with no real structure and no real organization behind it.” Worse, the company ends up with a whole team of developers focused on payments “while my product is something completely different.”

That last line is what actually costs companies, and it’s the one Orchestra is built to erase. For the SaaS and platform companies it serves – teams that embed payments into products their own customers use – engineering time is the scarcest resource there is. Every sprint spent maintaining payment plumbing is a sprint not spent on the product that actually differentiates them. By collapsing all of those connections into one, Orchestra hands that capacity back: the payments backlog stops growing, and developers return to the work the business is actually in.

Orchestra’s pitch in that situation is a modest one: don’t break what works. The team’s advice to prospects is to make their next integration with Orchestra rather than directly with another gateway. Because once that single connection exists, every future processor and payment method flows through Orchestra – no new integration required. Start small, in a low-stakes environment, build trust, and let the infrastructure carry the next expansion. “If it’s working, great. Don’t touch it,” Nevo says. “Do the next integration with Orchestra.”

The One Thing Worth Rethinking

Ask Nevo what a business reassessing its payment setup should think differently about, and his answer is less about technology than about time horizon.

“Think about payments, not what you need today, but what will you need tomorrow,” he says. If you can see expansion on the horizon – new regions, new processors, alternative payment methods beyond cards – build the infrastructure for it now. The goal isn’t to over-engineer, but to stop letting payments dictate where and how fast you can grow. Done right, the infrastructure flips from a constraint you fight to a lever you pull – each new market or method becomes a configuration choice rather than a development project. “It’s much easier to do it today rather than tomorrow.”

It’s fitting advice from a company that, almost by accident, did exactly that – building the pieces of a category before the category had a name.

To learn more or get in touch, visit orchestrasolutions.com.