Payflows, a one-stop SaaS platform designed for finance teams, has raised €25m in funding to build the operating system that seamlessly integrates finance teams and workflows together. The Series A is led by Balderton Capital with existing investors Headline and Ribbit Capital doubling down on their previous investments.
Founded in 2022 by former Luko executives Pauline Glikman and Joseph Assouline, Payflows is building a ‘love letter to the finance team’ after observing how legacy systems for the crucial finance function were broken.
Historically, finance teams have been working in silos, locked into hours of manual and repetitive tasks, while their tech needs and requests go unmet. Just as Salesforce transformed the sales function - bringing a single, accessible location for all customer information, eliminating data silos and enabling collaboration - Payflows offers finance teams a single source of truth for accounts payable, account receivable, customers, suppliers, payments and cashflows, bringing insight to all team members.
Real-time visibility in payments and treasury
Glikman, CEO, and Assouline, CTO, are building a single platform of modular products that sits on top of a company’s ERP and gives modern finance teams the insights and control they need, through:
- Real-time visibility: Payflows allows a finance team to work together with real-time visibility of open requests, POs, invoices and payments, without needing a licence to any other system.
- Smoother collaboration: The platform breaks down silos and allows employees to see the progress of tasks at all stages, with a user experience akin to consumer tech.
- Increased productivity: It also allows finance teams to take advantage of automation and AI tools that increase their productivity.
Using Payflows, CFOs need only pay for the expensive ERP licences they really need while maintaining access for their teams to the data they need to do their jobs efficiently.
Pauline said: "We designed Payflows as the missing piece in the CFO toolkit: a single platform for finance teams to sync and orchestrate data across all their Enterprise Resource Planning tools and financial systems, with automation and collaboration at the core. With Payflows, payment, cash management, procurement and cash collection workflows can be modified in seconds—no code required—directly by the finance team, without the need to hire developers or expensive consultants. We give the modern finance team the real-time control they deserve.”
Targeting companies with complex needs
Payflows is providing solutions for scaling companies at the mid to upper end of growth, particularly those who are facing complex regulations and operations across multiple markets and currencies. All too often, current solutions are either not sophisticated enough for their needs or simply too expensive. The platform works with legacy Enterprise Resource Management (ERP) tools, offering customers a cost-effective way to select product modules individually that combine together in a fully integrated financial system.
"We use Payflows to sync data from our banks, contract lifecycle management, ticketing systems, and ERP in a single place, giving our teams access to the information they need, in context. Payflows allowed us to break silos while saving a lot of money and reducing the number of licenses we have for each tool,"
says François-Guillaume Lutton at Reezocar (Group Société Générale).
Emerging from stealth
Founded in 2022, Payflows has been growing in stealth for almost two years with customers including Swile, Ornikar, Spendesk, and Podimo hearing about the company through peers. "The appetite from finance teams was large from the start and we’ve been growing through word of mouth. There’s a global need for a solution like this which recognises the crucial role that finance functions play," adds CEO Pauline.
Rana Yared, General Partner, Balderton Capital, said: “The CFO tech stack is overly complicated, and growing businesses are increasingly in need of solutions to streamline and optimise their financial tools and workflows. Payflows is building a modular platform that enhances visibility and collaboration for finance teams, accelerating productivity and cutting costs. We’re delighted to be working with Pauline and Joseph who have built an exceptional business that solves a very real and pressing challenge for CFOs. ”
Existing investors Ribbit Capital, which focuses on financial innovation and invested in neobanks Revolut and Plaid, and Headline have participated in this round.
“There are plenty of FinTech SaaS startups that focus on a single CFO pain point: accounts payable, procurement, cash management, and payment infrastructure. Payflows stands apart by offering them as modules within a platform that is larger than the sum of its parts. 'Pauline and Joseph are realizing a big vision exceptionally fast,'
says Jonathan Userovici, General Partner at Headline. 