Pennylane, the actionable accounting service, announces a €4m seed round
May 18th, 2020
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Pennylane, the fintech pioneer of real-time management accounting, is raising €4m via its group, in the middle of lockdown, from Global Founders Capital, Partech and Kima Ventures. These funds will be used to continue to develop its platform in order to simplify admin, accounting and piloting and expand its teams of experts. With its real-time approach to accounting, Pennylane is finally making financial and accounting data actionable by entrepreneurs to help them pilot their business.
- Launched a few months ago in beta, Pennylane already supports more than 100 startups and SMEs, including Luko, Liberkeys and Pricemoov.
- This fund-raising will be used to develop its platform and expand its teams of accountants, in order to offer its clients an exceptional user experience.
- Pennylane aims at offering an outstanding customer and user experience with a fair and transparent monthly pricing.
- Based on accounting data, Pennylane allows decision-makers to run and pilot their business in real time with a single product.
The Pennylane Team
Pennyane’s service relies on a number of integrations and enables the processing of startup and SMBs’ financial data in real time. This data is presented to decision-makers in suitable dashboards (reports, business plans, cash management). The Pennylane accountants, “augmented” by technology, provide their clients with daily support and value-added services.
Created by the founders of PriceMatch – acquired by Booking.com in 2015 – Pennylane was conceived as an alternative to accounting too often viewed as a non-strategic expense by managers. How many managers have a business plan in Excel? Yet accountants have access to all the data needed to financially drive a business. This data is normally processed at the end of the month rather than on an ongoing basis and presented in a format convenient for the tax authorities but not for managers and business owners. Often, entrepreneurs only become aware of the financial health of their business at the monthly or annual review.
After investing in around 30 companies, Arthur Waller reached the same conclusion as his investors, Global Founders Capital, Partech and Kima: companies are struggling to manage their business in real time and to generate reports, despite these being essential to decision-making. Managers do not have instant financial information about their businesses, although all this data is held by the accountant. Pennylane’s mission is to reconcile accounting and management, in order to provide its clients with the tools to manage their cash flow.
For Arthur Waller, co-founder of Pennylane, “Real-time and actionable accounting is a natural choice for startups that have taken advantage of digitalization to improve their efficiency and speed. With the real-time dashboard, we offer managers a real value-added service that will help them to make the right decisions faster. This is only possible because we offer a human service powered by technology”
David Sainteff, Partner at Global Founders Capital, says, “It seems essential today to provide managers with a single product, capable not only of managing their accounts, but also of providing the necessary transparency to manage their business. Pennylane’s ambition to reconcile accounting and management resonates particularly in a context in which cash management is a vital challenge.”
Digitizing data collection and providing a dashboard
Pennylane automates the recovery of fragmented financial data by connecting to banks, invoicing systems, Google Drive as well as other solutions such as Payfit for payroll management and Stripe for invoicing. Pennylane then processes this data in order to provide conventional bookkeeping (general chart of accounts) as well as a dashboard indicating the financial profitability of each activity and cash management tools.
A high value-added accountancy service
Pennylane brings together technology and people to free up the accountant’s time to focus on higher value-added tasks. This conviction that technology alone cannot resolve every problem is becoming increasingly widespread and Pennylane is responding by releasing accountants from inputting and categorization tasks so that they can devote themselves to their advisory and management roles.
Virtuous real-time accounting
Pennylane’s ambition is to provide business owners with tools to better manage their businesses. Thanks to the real-time dashboards, the company knows if and when it can invest to grow, acquire equipment, recruit, etc. Since it is more agile, the company has the information necessary to seize opportunities and improve assessment of its strategic decisions.
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About Pennylane
The Pennylane project was launched at the end of 2019 in Paris. Pennylane brings together accountants and technology to assist startup founders and small business owners with their administrative management: invoicing, billing, suppliers’ payment, cash management, accounting and forecasting. It aims at providing them with actionable insights and to go from accounting to action. Pennylane provides its support to more than 100 French startups and SMEs. As a fast-growing company, it plans to hire 25 more accountants in 2020.
About Global Founders Capital
Global Founders Capital has been supporting entrepreneurs around the world for several years. Our teams of operators and entrepreneurs offer unique expertise and support in the technology sector. Over the past 20 years, we have contributed to the growth of more than 500 companies around the world. Facebook, Linkedin, Zalando, Lazada, Traveloka, Trivago, Jumia, Away Travel, HelloFresh, Eventbrite, Funding Circle, Slack, Revolut, Canva, Meero form a non-exhaustive list of our successes. Global Founders Capital manages more than $1.2 billion in capital and has 11 offices around the world.
About Partech
With a portfolio of almost 180 companies spread across 30 countries in Europe, the US, Africa, and Asia, Partech has been one of the leading international investors helping visionary founders for almost 40 years. The Partech team – made up of both former entrepreneurs and executives from 15 different countries – brings capital, experience, strategic support, and networks to entrepreneurs at every stage of development: seed, venture, and growth. With over€1.5B AUM, Partech invests tickets from€200K to €50M in B2B and B2C technologies reshaping industries. Companies backed by Partech have completed more than 21 IPOs and more than 50 strategic M&A transactions valued over $100M.
About Kima
Kima Ventures is the startup investment vehicle of Xavier Niel. One of the world’s most active early stage investors, Kima invests in 100 startups per year from Seed to Series A. Based at Station F in Paris, Kima has invested in close to 700 startups since 2010, including Transferwise, Trainline, Zenly, Payfit, Docker, and Ledger – offering financing, networks, and support to help them reach the next step of their journeys.
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