If you talk to a FinTech businessman about their business, the chances are that they will end up talking about ledger issues at some point.
A book is a file of money movements that serve as a source of truth for financial assets, but when a company begins to have multiple bank accounts, payment processors and funds spread in distinct services, it can become a headache to manage. Most companies end up devoting mechanical resources to build their own books to solve it.
The French starting form began to try to benefit from this need with an open source, programmable economic book that can monitor all assets moving in and out of your accounts. Now, this product serves as a spine for a wider, more ambitious infrastructure game.
“In 2024, even before, we mainly focused the book. And then we started preparing to move from a product of an individual book on the form platform with other modules – the reconciliation department, for example, the links with the payment services etc.” Co -founder and CTO Clément Salaün in TechCrunch.
The formation currently offers five products: In addition to the book, there is a connectivity platform to integrate financial providers using a single API. orchestrates payments to move money to wallets and payment providers; and reconciliation.
The start is also working on a mass payment product for purchases and other companies to issue payments. Developers can already manage programming payments using stripe, adyen or mangopay, but the formula wants to create a middleware that operates on various providers.
The company recently set a series of $ 21 million in round co-head from Paypal ventures and Transport. Existing investors Y Combinator, Hoxton Ventures and Axeleo also participate.
A platform game
Starting believes there is value in offering a hinged platform that is similar to taking Amazon Web Services for Cloud Hosting: Customers can use a single service, but it is more effective if you house all your cloud infrastructure under the same roof.
“We will release a number of other sections, which are particularly related to financial businesses,” Salaün said. “We will go further with exports for accounting tools. We will also improve connectivity one step further and descend under the stack and work on banking at a lower level. So we will really continue to form the entire stack.”
At the same time, the team wishes to ensure that the cost of integration remains as low as possible for its customers if they wish to add another section.
“If you have three Saas products to manage. You will pass. I do not know, $ 150,000 in three products and $ 150,000 in internal glue to connect them together,” Salaün said. “Economic infrastructure is really a ‘long tail of small problems’, each of which could be a company with $ 10 million [annual recurring revenue] – This. But it’s really this platform game that can help us scale more than that. ”
Larger Fintech companies such as Stripe also offer many Fintech infrastructure services, but Formance wants to remain independent. It does not process payments and does not own the customers’ own money.
The company claims to have about 20 customers, two of whom are in the US – according to Salaün, these two customers account for 40% of startup revenue. Its other customers include booksy, doctolib, liberis and shares.
With $ 21 million in the bank, the formation plans to open an office in New York and hire a Go-To-Market team there. It also wants to scan the groups of engineers and products in accordance with its goal of increasing its number from 20 to 50 employees by the end of 2025.
