If you are talking to a FinTech business about their business, the opportunities they will end up talking about ledger issues at some point.
A ledger is a record of money movements that serve as a source of reality for financial assets, but when a company begins to have multiple bank accounts, payment and funding processors spread over services Of discrete, it can be a headache to manage. Most companies end up offering engineering resources to generate their own ledgers to solve that.
The French Startup Formance has begun trying to capitalize this need with an open resource, program financial ledger that can monitor all the properties that move and exit your accounts. Today, that product serves as a spine for a wider, more ambitious infrastructure play.
“In 2024, and even before, we were primarily focused on the Ledger. And then we started preparing to move from a single ledger product to the formance platform with other modules – the part of reconciliation, for example, connectors in payment services, etc.
The formance of five products is currently offering: in addition to the ledger, there is a connection platform to include financial providers using a single API; Orchestrate payments to transfer money throughout the purses and payments providers; and reconciliation.
The start also works with a mass payout product for markets and other companies that need to issue payments. Developers can now manage payouts programmatically using stripe, adyen or mangopy, but the formance wants to build middleware that works with many providers.
Recently raised $ 21 million series a $ 21 million series of a circle headed by Paypal ventures and Portage. Existing investors Y combinators, hoxton ventures and Axeleo are also participating.
A platform play
Startup believes that there is a value in offering a modular platform similar of cloud under the same roof.
“We will release many other modules, especially associated with financial operations,” Salaün said. “We're going more than just exports for accounting tools. We'll also go to improve connectivity one step further and get off the clamp and work on banking to a lower level. So we will definitely continue to be able to – Moduralize the whole clamp. “
At the same time, the team wants to ensure that integration costs will remain as low as possible for their clients if they want to add another module.
“If you get three SAAS products to manage those, you spend, I don't know, $ 150,000 out of three products and $ 150,000 in internal glue to relate them,” Salaün said. “The financial infrastructure is actually a 'long tail of small problems,' each can be a company with $ 10 million in [annual recurring revenue] – something like that. But it's really playing a platform that will help us to measure more than that. “
Larger fintech companies such as stripe also offer many Fintech infrastructure services, but the formance wants to remain independent. It does not process payments, and it does not hold the clients' own money.
The company says it has nearly 20 customers, two of them are in the US – according to Salaün, these two customers represent 40% of the start income. Other clients include Booksy, Doctolib, Liberis and Sharing.
With fresh $ 21 million in the bank, the formance plans to open a New York office and hire a go-to-market team there. It also wants to -out the engineering and product teams that are in line with its purpose to increase its headcount from 20 to 50 employees by the end of 2025.
