Stephen Wilcock | CTO, Paddle | Top 30 EMEA CTOs 2026

Career History

Stephen Wilcock was appointed Chief Technology Officer of Paddle in September 2024, becoming responsible for the engineering function, technology roadmap and global infrastructure needed to support Paddle’s rapid growth. He brings more than two decades of experience leading engineering organisations across software, ecommerce and online platforms.

Prior to Paddle, Wilcock was CTO at Bloom & Wild from January 2023 to May 2024, and before that, Group Engineering Director at Cazoo, where he led a software engineering organisation of several hundred people across the UK and Europe. He previously spent five years as CTO of legal technology company Apperio (later acquired by Persuit), overseeing its technology organisation as the business scaled its SaaS platform for managing corporate legal spend.

He holds a BSc in Mathematics & Computer Science from Durham University.

About Paddle

Paddle is a UK-based payments infrastructure and Merchant of Record (MoR) platform for SaaS, app and digital product companies. Its all-in-one platform handles global payments, subscription billing, tax and compliance, and fraud protection, allowing software companies to sell in over 300 markets without managing local payment rails or regulatory filings.

Backed by leading investors such as KKR and FTV Capital, Paddle powers thousands of software companies and processes billions of dollars in transactions annually as it expands across Europe and North America.

Paddle became a unicorn following a $200m funding round in 2022 and raised a further $25m from CIBC Innovation Banking in 2025 to support international expansion and product development. The company has increasingly expanded its offering towards app developers and AI-native companies.