Pennylane, Qonto, Agicap, Pleo, and Mollie all have one thing in common: they all use Chift in some way to manage their integrations with other services. The relatively young, Belgium-based startup just raised a seed round of 2.3 million euros ($2.5 million at today's exchange rates).
Many fintech startups rely on integrations to align their products with their customers' financial stack. They often end up building a myriad of connectors and partner integrations to keep financial information consistent across multiple products. As their integration ecosystem grows, they may also rely on iPaaS providers (integration platform as a service).
Chift essentially acts as a third-party integration specialist – a bit like Codat in the UK or Merge in the US: Rather than building connectors one by one, Chift provides a set of integration APIs compatible with the most popular financial tools.
For example, Chift has developed accounting APIs that are compatible with accounting software from Sage, Cegid and Pennylane in France. The company has also developed integrations with invoicing tools, e-commerce platforms and point-of-sale software.
Chift decided to focus on financial tools first: “We are integrating with tools that generate financial data,” co-founder and CEO Gauthier Henroz told TechCrunch.
Unlike other industries, the Fintech market is still relatively fragmented, with every European country having its own accounting or invoicing platform, but having access to financial data from any SaaS product is useful.
As more businesses use Chift, the startup will be able to add more connectors. All of Chift's clients will be able to benefit from these new integrations. An added benefit for Chift is that it creates a lower barrier of entry for new entrants.
“In Europe, that's where all the complexities are. Every country is different, especially when it comes to accounting, point of sale and invoicing tools,” Henroz said.
“We help our customers, they upsell and they open new markets. It's integrated, it's connected, it connects customers to other customers and it creates new opportunities for them, so there's very little churn,” he added later in the conversation.
Developing integrations is also not a one-time project. Companies release updates to their APIs that can lead to outages. Chift is responsible for maintaining these integrations. SaaS companies can focus on their core product, not these integrations.
Investors in the seed round include Entourage (Peter-Jan Bouten's fund), Shapers (Philip Teixeira da Mota's fund), Cedar Fund, and several business angels. “Our goal is to become a leader in Europe,” Henroz said.