Every company relies on three core pillars to function. Each of these pillars utilizes its own tools, ranging from sophisticated software of corporations to traditional pen and paper:
- Human Capital Management (HCM) for employees and hiring
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for customers
- Enterprise Resource Planning (ERPs) for day-to-day business activities
While we've seen tremendous innovation in the worlds of HCMs (think of Workday, or our portfolio company AG5) and CRMs (Salesforce, or our portfolio company Attio for a more modern take), things have been a looooot slower for ERPs.
Given the size, age, and depth of product offering, large-scale ERPs (think SAP or NetSuite) simply cannot follow the pace of innovation in recent years: from accelerated cloud adoption, increased data usage, and associated storage issues, to the complications that have come with offering and accepting multiple payment methods.
What happens today: when a business scales, it must implement solutions on top of its ERP to manage to stream part of its operations: procurement, accounts payable, accounts receivable, treasury management, payments, and more. Some opt for a myriad of individual software products that poorly connect with one another, resulting in stacked-up costs, and time-consuming and repetitive manual tasks.
Keeping this in mind, here’s a rough ERP history:
This pain is felt in particular by growth-stage companies. Even the most innovative businesses have to choose between a:
1) A stack of individual products that don’t connect well with one another and must be paid for and implemented one by one
2) The centralization offered by legacy Enterprise Resource Management. These offer poor user experience, little automation, and no collaboration or AI features. Their pricing model based on a "per seat" approach hinders collaboration and communication, as companies tend to limit seat counts to keep costs low.
Hello, Payflows! The operating system (OS) streamlines these various data sources, allowing companies to reduce the point solutions they pay for, and ultimately better manage their money.
Finance’s Mission Control
We first partnered (thanks to an initial intro from Salomon Aiach, GP at Origins Fund)
with Pauline Glikman and Joseph Assouline for their €5M Seed round, co-led with Ribbit Capital. We knew there were a ton of other FinTech SaaS startups that focused on individual pain points felt by CFOs and their teams.
Some of these companies try to improve accounts payable or procurement. Others tackle cash management or try to modernize the payment stack. Payflows stood apart by offering these and more as modules within an automated platform that was bigger than the sum of its parts. Each module can be purchased and deployed independently, but the offering becomes much more powerful when all the pieces of the puzzle are combined:
Taking an in-depth look at the main pieces:
1. Payflows Procurement module: Intake to Procure and Intake to Pay
Today, companies have an incredibly high number of vendors they use and pay for all types of services. For software alone, a company with between 500 and 2000 FTEs has 335 subscriptions on average (up 33% since 2021, according to the latest Business Wire State of SaaS report).
Increasingly siloed and distributed teams make controlling spend and software usage difficult at scale. Payflows built a procure-to-pay module to centralize all of this information in one place, by fixing the user experience for employees to request any type of spend in seconds, get routed through approval flows, and feed any existing procurement system with the output data.
- Intake-to-procure: Covers the entire buying experience in a centralized way - from intuitive user experience on spend requests and approval workflows, to streamlined automated Purchase Order (PO) generation and supplier onboarding and management, to savings through budgeting and renewals.
- Intake-to-pay: Covers the post-buying experience - from centralizing all invoices automatically, through to invoice processing and Accounts Payable (AP), to the payment requests and execution.
2. Payflows Treasury:
Payflows' Treasury Management System (TMS) module enables companies to have a centralized view of their current and forecasted financial situations through:
- Real-time cash flow visibility: This feature provides a single gateway to all financial and banking data, including bank accounts, Payment Service Providers (PSPs), and Alternative Payment Methods (APMs). It offers report generation and natively customized views depending on the stakeholders, ensuring that all relevant financial information is easily accessible and comprehensible.
- Cash management forecasts: This tool allows companies to better anticipate potential liquidity issues. It helps in planning and preparing for various financial conditions by projecting future cash flows based on current data and trends.
- Centralized payment hub: This hub facilitates automatic payments through wire or virtual cards in different currencies, eliminating the need to manually approve payments across different tools and banking interfaces. This not only streamlines the payment process but also reduces the risk of fraud by centralizing and automating payment approvals.
- Automated banking reconciliation: This allows for real-time synchronization between the ERP system and Payflows, removing the need to manually import and harmonize bank statements and payment files between systems. It ensures that all financial records are up-to-date and accurate, minimizing errors and saving time on financial management tasks.
3. Order to Cash:
All for-profit companies charge for the services they provide, which involves managing cash collection or accounts receivables (AR) modules. Collecting unpaid invoices is a massive burden for companies — a challenge that Payflows is working on resolving by building PSP and ERP connectivity layers, cash collection workflows, and customer payment portals.
A French Love Letter to Finance Teams
Built out of Paris, Pauline and Joseph are two tech operators with exceptional product DNA. Pauline has led multiple growth and operations teams across the world at Airbnb, while Joseph has been in the driving seat of various ML/AI engineering roles within banks, the French government, and tech scale-ups.
After countless CFO interviews and testing hundreds of specialized software solutions, the duo identified a clear pattern: the most outdated software used by an organization can be found in the CFO, procurement, and treasury offices. With their own headcounts kept small to set a budgeting example and often working in almost isolation from the broader organization, the finance team's tech requests systematically fall off the roadmap. As a result, finance teams often find themselves locked into hours of manual and repetitive tasks.
Noticing this, the pair set themselves a simple goal: to build the one-stop platform for all the finance team's needs—the equivalent of what Salesforce is to the sales team. Or, as Pauline and Joseph like to call it, a love letter to the finance team (function):
"We design Payflows as the missing piece in the CFO toolkit: a single platform for finance teams to sync and orchestrate data across all their ERPs and financial systems, with automation and collaboration at the core. With Payflows, payment, cash management, and procurement workflows can be modified in seconds—no code required—directly by the finance team without the need to hire developers or expensive Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) consultants. We give the modern finance team the real-time control they deserve," says Pauline.
The resulting product turned out to be an immediate hit. Pauline and Joseph's vision resonated so well that they decided to focus on their product and the inbound leads they were receiving and, unusually, not to announce the Seed round in 2023.
Fast forward one year. Customers include both public enterprise companies as well as growth-stage tech companies like Swile, Ornikar, Spendesk, and Podimo. Today, Balderton Capital joins the cap table in what is now a combined €25M funding round.
Headline has a long history of being first believers & partners with founders who approach their market segment with horizontal, one-stop-shop products that encompass multiple customer needs. Founders like Peter from Segment, Loic from Swile, or Daniela and Ricardo from Pismo to name a few, envisioned deep platform playbooks from Day 1, building generational companies.
We can’t wait to continue working alongside Pauline and Joseph as well as they build the ultimate financial automation platform for modern companies. And if you feel the same way, they are always hiring great talent! (here).
Photo by Samuel Sotto