FinTech news in France category

If you’re not familiar with eFounders, the startup studio comes up with ideas for new startups, teams up with two co-founders and help with the product-market fit phase in exchange for a stake in the startup. eFounders co-founder Thibaud Elziere will be the interim head of studio and Salesmachine co-founder Florent Quinti will be the first 3founders employee.

A few months after raising $1 billion, payments startup Checkout.com has announced that it plans to acquire French startup Ubble, which operates a remote identity verification service. When looking at digital identity verification startups, Checkout.com had a few criteria, such as accuracy, speed of decision, how many types of different frauds they can detect and how sophisticated it is. Following this acquisition, there could be some customers that start their relationship with Checkout.com through identity verification.

When I met with Lydia’s co-founders Cyril Chiche and Antoine Porte, they both had read my recent article on Zenly, another popular social app designed in Paris.

Moove, an African mobility fintech that provides vehicle financing to drivers of ride-hailing platforms like Uber and other gig networks, has raised $105 million in new Series A2 financing.

Finary also believes that building a new private bank also means that the most active customers should be able to own a stake in the startup. The company is also working on additional features, such as a family mode, a better way to track RSUs (or BSPCE in France) and the ability to separate personal wealth from professional wealth.

The payment option can be integrated in the payment terminals, or merchants can generate a payment link and share it with customers. Alma has a payment option that lets you buy something and pay 15 or 30 days later. No late fees.

And Silvr doesn’t necessarily replace VC money, as 35% of Silvr’s clients have raised capital from VC funds. When a company applies to unlock some credit with Silvr, they grant access to various data sources — the corporate bank account.

Earlybird, best known as the Berlin-based VC which has backed myriad German and European startups such as SoundCloud and N26, is today expanding its reach in Europe with the creation of a team and adjunct fund based out of Paris, France. According to most annual European surveys, France regularly appears as the third biggest startup ecosystem in Europe, (behind first the U.K. and then Germany) and last year investment in French startups doubled. The background to this of course is that European VC is (finally!) becoming more competitive as it feels the heat both from U.S. VCs, and also other European VCs using remote working and deal-making to suck up deals well outside their territories. The fund’s core focus lies on early-stage companies — predominantly seed and Series A — and will be supporting French entrepreneurs with initial investments of between €1 million to €10 million.

While there are still a lot of SMEs that are not using Qonto in France, Germany, Spain and Italy, Qonto also plans to enter new market in 2023.

With 700 employees in Paris, Berlin, Barcelona and London, PayFit now wants to diversify its product offering, integrate with more third-party products and improve its customer service.