- Chift has obtained €10.5 million in its Series A funding round, with BlackFin Capital Partners acting as the lead investor.
- The startup based in Brussels connects over 120 financial systems via a single API.
- Since raising capital in 2024, Chift’s revenue has increased by more than tenfold, and the company now serves over 50,000 SME clients.
Prior to launching Chift, two brothers and a university friend had been talking for months with developers who said that European business software did not work well together. Now, three years later, they have founded Chift to address this issue and have raised €10.5 million to continue their work.
The Series A financing was led by BlackFin Capital Partners, a European fintech investor, with Entourage, Shapers, the Seeder Fund, and Wallonie Entreprendre also increasing their holdings.
Gauthier Henroz, co-founder and CEO of Chift, stated, “AI and e-invoicing are rebuilding the entire financial software market, and businesses run on more tools than ever. Interoperability is becoming the defining problem of European SMB finance. Its fragmentation makes that harder to build than anywhere, as systems are split across 27 countries. That is exactly why we build the infrastructure that connects it all.”
Fragmentation presents an opportunity
Adyen estimates that the B2B SaaS platforms sector has $185 billion in addressable embedded-finance revenue, of which less than one-fifth is currently being captured. McKinsey forecasts that Europe’s embedded finance market will surpass $116 billion by 2030. AI agents further raise the level of competition.
Chift was founded in Brussels in 2022 by Henroz, Henry Hertoghe and Matthieu Hertoghe. Both Hertoghe brothers studied at KU Leuven. Since its launch, the company has operated internationally and currently employs 35 people.
The company provides software companies with a single API that lets them connect to more than 120 financial systems, including accounting, invoicing, point-of-sale, e-commerce, payments, and property management. For example, an invoicing platform enables its users to send invoices to 40 different accounting programmes without creating separate integrations.
Other companies are also active in this field
Codat, based in London, has raised $172 million from investors including American Express, Index Ventures, JPMorgan, and Plaid, and focuses on banks and lenders that underwrite small-business credit in the United States and the United Kingdom. Merge.dev provides a horizontal solution by offering a single API that covers HR, recruiting, and accounting for US-based SaaS companies.
By contrast, Chift continues to focus on financial connectivity, particularly the intricacies of continental European accounting systems.
Now that new regulations are affecting the sector, this funding has taken place. The EU’s new e-invoicing rules will force all small and medium-sized enterprises to digitise their financial operations, a development that has already enabled Pennylane to raise $200 million this year. Pennylane, Revolut, Qonto, and Mollie are currently customers of Chift.
“Financial data connectivity is genuinely hard to build, particularly in Europe, where data sits
across dozens of local systems that were never designed to talk to each other. That difficulty is
what makes Chift’s position valuable. And AI raises the stakes further: agents are only as good
as the data they can access,” said Pauline Brunel, investment director at BlackFin Capital Partners, who also led BlackFin’s Series A into climate-investing platform Carbon Equity.
What comes next
This most recent funding round has brought Chift’s total funding to around €12.8 million, following its €2.3 million seed round in 2024. The additional capital will be used by Chift to expand its presence in the major European markets and to develop AI-driven integrations that will set up automatically, eliminating the need for users to configure them manually.
Henroz states that Chift aims to become Europe’s leading financial connectivity platform by 2028. The key challenge is whether it can remain independent if the accounting platforms and neobanks it works with choose to develop their own integrations.
