French fintech Pennylane, which offers an online full-stack accounting service, has already completed a new round of financing with its historical investors, Global Founders Capital and Partech. In light of the success of its online bookkeeping solution, Pennylane has expanded its offer with a SaaS to enable all company managers to regain full control of their finances.
Launched last year by the founders of PriceMatch (acquired by Booking.com in 2015), Pennylane uses accounting data to help entrepreneurs manage their day-to-day business. Pennylane raised a €4 million seed round with Global Founders Capital, Partech, and Kima Ventures in May 2020, and has been experiencing quick growth since. In less than a year, the startup has generated a revenue of more than €2 million, hired about 30 accountants and 15 developers, and now supports 500+ customers on a daily basis (mostly startups, SMEs, e-commerces, and restaurant owners).
Pennylane enables business leaders to access their complete, reliable, and up-to-date financial data at any time in order to make the right decisions.
Many businesses feel the same way: there are too many tools that are poorly synchronized with each other, collaboration with accountants is archaic, and visibility on activity and cash flows is lacking. Pennylane has therefore developed an innovative accountancy service, Pennylane Compta, which reconciles accounting and management, in particular thanks to the use of a platform shared between the accountant and the business manager.
This unique year has highlighted the key role played by outsourced accountants as trusted third parties to support managers. Business leaders are close to their accountant but can sometimes get frustrated by the tools they use, which limit collaboration and real-time visibility into their company’s financial data. This is why Pennylane decided to go even further and launches today a new solution that centralizes all purchasing, sales, and banking transaction data to make it a real management and decision-making tool for company managers. Managers will ‘have the opportunity to give access to their accountants, so they may keep the ‘books’. This is how the Pennylane solution was born, positioning the company as one of the first players to offer a full-stack financial management service that makes decision-making easy.
“This new round of financing will enable Pennylane to fully pursue its mission of supporting the company’s management team in this context of crisis and forced digital transformation”, said Arthur Waller, co-founder and CEO of Pennylane. “We are also taking a new step in our development by strengthening our offer with the first full-stack financial management platform, which automatically integrates all data for a clear view of the business and real-time management. Entirely developed in-house, this solution is connected to many third-party tools and offers excellent user experience by integrating extremely advanced features to make it a real day-to-day decision-making tool. For Pennylane, digital alone can do nothing, it must serve and empower managers and accountants.”
David Sainteff, Partner at Global Founders Capital, said: “We were convinced from the very beginning by the relevance of Pennylane’s positioning and the innovative vision of its co-founders. In just one year, Pennylane has proven its ability to meet a growing need of companies: accessing all its financial data in one place being a strategic asset in the midst of the economic crisis. We support the idea that Pennylane will become the financial Operating System for European SMEs within the next five years. We are delighted to participate in this new round of financing, which will enable the company to roll out its offer”.
