09.02.2024
40 million Series C turns French Pennylane into unicorn
French accounting and finance software Pennylane, founded in 2020, adds another 40 million euro in a Series C from DST Global and Sequoia Capital to its previous funding rounds, which have already raised more than 100 million euro. With this latest additional 40 million euro, Pennylane is valued at more than one billion euro 🦄
Announced by co-founder Arthur Waller, this is another big funding round for a French accounting software startup, after French competitor Indy raised 40 million euros in November last year.
On the other side of the competition is Qonto, the European business bank that has just completed the acquisition and integration of German Penta. While Pennylane seems to be expanding its banking efforts beyond the 20% of its users who already use Pennylane as a bank, Qonto is coming from the other direction, expanding its accounting capabilities while already being present in several European markets.
Apart from offering a bank account, Pennylane provides everything you would expect from modern accounting software: OCR technology, payment cards, third-party import of external receipts, AI for scraping accounting data and in the form of an accounting co-pilot.
All these features are used by more than 2.000 French accounting firms, who claim to save up to 15% of their time on average per case by using Pennylane. Thanks to the widespread adoption by accounting firms and tax advisors, 120.000 SMEs also rely on Pennylane's software. This represents around 4% of the French SME market (according to 2021 figures) and a growth of 4.000% since two years ago.
Raising this amount of money in the current market is quite an achievement, especially considering that Pennylane is not a green energy startup. Nevertheless, Pennylane must now prove its ability to move out of the red. According to its own estimates, this should take no more than 18 months 👀
Additional sources
French accounting and finance software Pennylane, founded in 2020, adds another 40 million euro in a Series C from DST Global and Sequoia Capital to its previous funding rounds, which have already raised more than 100 million euro. With this latest additional 40 million euro, Pennylane is valued at more than one billion euro 🦄
Announced by co-founder Arthur Waller, this is another big funding round for a French accounting software startup, after French competitor Indy raised 40 million euros in November last year.
On the other side of the competition is Qonto, the European business bank that has just completed the acquisition and integration of German Penta. While Pennylane seems to be expanding its banking efforts beyond the 20% of its users who already use Pennylane as a bank, Qonto is coming from the other direction, expanding its accounting capabilities while already being present in several European markets.
Apart from offering a bank account, Pennylane provides everything you would expect from modern accounting software: OCR technology, payment cards, third-party import of external receipts, AI for scraping accounting data and in the form of an accounting co-pilot.
All these features are used by more than 2.000 French accounting firms, who claim to save up to 15% of their time on average per case by using Pennylane. Thanks to the widespread adoption by accounting firms and tax advisors, 120.000 SMEs also rely on Pennylane's software. This represents around 4% of the French SME market (according to 2021 figures) and a growth of 4.000% since two years ago.
Raising this amount of money in the current market is quite an achievement, especially considering that Pennylane is not a green energy startup. Nevertheless, Pennylane must now prove its ability to move out of the red. According to its own estimates, this should take no more than 18 months 👀