Finnish fintech company Zervant, which provides online invoicing software for small business and entrepreneurs across Europe, has announced €6 million in funding. The investment was led by Tesi, along with Northzone, NFT Ventures and Conor Venture Partners.
Headquartered in Espoo (Finland) and was founded in 2010, Zervant offers simple, intuitive invoicing software. It’s already used by 20,000 business customers across seven countries, with 85% of current growth coming from France, Germany and the UK.
The company plans to use the investment to grow the use of electronic invoicing among its core demographic – micro businesses. It will also look to introduce a range of premium features for users, designed to ease the financial pressures that come with running your own business.
Mattias Hansson, Zervant co-founder and CEO, stated: “We founded our company to ‘help entrepreneurs succeed’, and that is still what drives us day in, day out. This investment will help us to grow even faster across Europe, and help micro enterprises to benefit from the market shift driven by legislation. We’re also looking forward to offering them new solutions that will speed up their invoicing cash flow.”
The focus on electronic invoicing is particularly relevant, given that the EU has issued a directive on the matter, which comes into force this year, and aims to make electronic invoicing the main form of invoicing in Europe by 2020.
Hansson added: “Regulatory changes in the financial space, along with the widespread switch to digital, present entrepreneurs with a whole new set of possibilities for running their businesses more efficiently. It’s our goal to make sure that they have access to all this potential – be it by helping with access to finance or helping our customers make smarter business decisions.”
Jussi Sainiemi, Investment Director at Tesi, commented that “Zervant has shown very impressive growth by tripling its active customer base to 20,000 businesses during 2017. Zervant’s service is widely considered to be the technology leader in the field of digital invoicing for SMEs. We are particularly excited about the company, as it is our first investment in the fintech sector.”
Zervant provides simple online invoicing for small businesses across Europe. Its core markets are France, Germany, the UK, Finland and Sweden. Zervant so far has raised over €14 million of venture capital and angel funding. The previous round was closed in 2016. In 2017 1,000,000 invoices were sent using Zervant, with a face value of €1 billion.
