Paris-based Rivage has secured €2.6 million in pre-seed funding to fast-track the rollout of its payroll software across accounting firms. The round was led by Partech, alongside business angel entrepreneurs from the tech and accounting worlds, including the founders of Skello, Hexa, Quarksup and Teledec.
The capital will support Rivage’s ambition to build a modern payroll infrastructure tailored to firms that manage payroll and social declarations for thousands of French businesses. In a market long dominated by rigid, ageing systems, this early backing signals strong confidence in the company’s approach.
From compliance tool to advisory engine
More than half of French employees rely on accounting firms or outsourcing providers for payroll and social security declarations. The software coordinating these flows occupies a strategic position in a vast yet underserved market.
Rivage is positioning payroll not as a back-office necessity, but as a gateway to higher-value HR advisory services. By strengthening auditability, tightening controls, and improving the reliability of payroll and DSN calculations, the platform transforms payroll data into actionable insight.
Built for scale from day one
Rivage was founded in July 2025 by engineers Ayoub Saidane and Paul Lemoine, alongside their HEC graduates Hector Vergeron and Tancrède d’Hauteville. Their combined technical and commercial expertise shaped a product designed not as a patchwork upgrade, but as a clean rebuild of payroll software.
The platform is open and interoperable by design. It was created to evolve alongside regulatory complexity and to absorb it at scale. Payroll managers, often burdened with repetitive and high-risk tasks, are central to this vision. Rivage aims to eliminate friction across the payroll cycle while maintaining precision and compliance.
Already in production, the software is deployed across eight partner accounting firms and covers 40 national collective agreements. This early operational footprint gives Rivage a foundation to scale rapidly in 2026.
What about diversity?
Talking about diversity statistics, “Our team is very diverse, with members from varied backgrounds: Ayoub Saidane is Tunisian, Bouchra Ettaleb is half-Moroccan, Huy Anh Nguyen is half-Vietnamese, and Alexandre Tchurukdichian is half-Armenian. Beyond international origins, our team also represents cities across France – from Lyon, Pau, Narbonne, Paris, Dijon, Troyes, to Mulhouse. This diversity has been a cornerstone of our culture and success, and we’re committed to maintaining it as we scale.”
Competitive landscape
Rivage stated to us, “Our main competitor is Silae. It’s an aging legacy software that is not collaborative or open, running counter to the modernity and flexibility that firms desperately need. Moreover, the solution is increasingly unsuited to its historical client base and offers an oversized horizontal platform for the needs of a growing portion of its legacy clients. Outside of Silae, no real player has managed to offer a genuine alternative until today.”
A new chapter for accounting firms
For accounting firms navigating digital transformation, this matters. As their SMB clients demand faster, more transparent services, firms need systems that are both robust and flexible. Rivage’s interoperable architecture echoes the renewal seen in adjacent segments of the accounting market, where new platforms have replaced outdated incumbents.
With eight firms already live and broader deployment planned for 2026, Rivage is moving beyond promise to execution. In a sector often resistant to change, it is offering something rare: payroll software built for today’s regulatory demands and tomorrow’s advisory opportunities.
The roadmap ahead
Detailing their plan for the next 12 months, Rivage stated, “Our main focus will be to extend Rivage’s regulatory coverage and enhance platform connectivity, while accelerating feature rollout to address increasingly complex edge cases and unlock further productivity gains for our users. We’re committed to covering the most critical collective agreements and integrating seamlessly with the broader accounting and HR ecosystem our partners rely on. Our goal is to cover over 150 collective agreements by year-end, representing 95% of market needs, and to integrate with more than 10 HR and accounting software platforms.”
“As investors in Pennylane, we know how much accounting firms are looking for solutions to increase productivity,” comments Alison Imbert, Partner at Partech. “When we met with the Rivage team, the evidence was clear. The payroll market needs a new player, and this founding team has an exceptional ability to exploit AI to build business software with deep functional capabilities and impeccable compliance.”
“Between the increasing complexity of regulatory frameworks, the accelerating digitalization of VSBs/SMBs and the suffocating monopoly imposed by legacy solutions, payroll has become a major pain point for firms. From the outset, we built Rivage with our accounting partners to enable them to break out of this dependence, to gain long-term productivity and to be in line with their customers’ demands,” says Tancrède d’Hauteville, CEO of Rivage. “This funding will enable us to accelerate the deployment of our solution, intensify the extension of our regulatory coverage and structure our legal practices, in an increasingly critical context for accounting firms.”
