The Berlin-based fintech startup Kontist just secured a big investment by Haufe Group – a German market leader in enterprise management and accounting for SMEs and freelancers. The Series A investment of Haufe Group comes on top of €5 million seed financing that Kontist had previously secured from founders, a Danish company builder, and the Danish growth fund VœkstFonden.
Founded in 2016, Kontist is a key component on the road toward the end-to-end automation of business processes via a central ecosystem. The startup makes finances easy with paperless bank account opening, mobile banking and more. We already introduced you to Kontist as a German startup to watch in 2017 and 2018.
“With our stake in Kontist, we’re taking another step forward for our customers – toward automating all their business processes and meeting their tax requirements. Entrepreneurs and freelancers no longer have to separate accounting and banking. Instead, they can manage their processes and their company just-in-time through a single platform solution. We’re therefore making a decisive contribution to driving the transformation of small and midsize businesses,” says Markus Reithwiesner, Holding Director Haufe Group.
The two partners’ first task together will be an in-depth technical integration of the Haufe’s accounting software lexoffice and the Kontist bank account. Users will then profit from automated accounting, a real-time estimate of tax payments due, and an integrated Mastercard for expenditure management. This combination will create a completely new user experience. What’s more, Haufe Group and Kontist are setting up a co-creation lab to develop innovative digital products. The objective is to rethink the business workflows of SMBs and streamline them by integrating different services and partners on one platform. The search is on for more partners from the financial sector to help realize this vision.
“Haufe Group, as the market leader, is the ideal strategic partner for Kontist, because it shares our vision of developing innovative services for the self-employed – and it also has decades of expertise with its wide range of products,” says Christopher Plantener, founder and CEO of Kontist.