London-based Translucent, the brainchild of Michael Wood (co-founder of Dext) has just secured a seed funding of £5M, setting sights on bringing order to the tangled financial data landscape of SMEs and multinational enterprises.
The seed round was led by LocalGlobe, known for backing industry giants like Wise and Zoopla. Further, Mike Chalfen’s VC firm, Chalfen Ventures also participated in the round. Chalfen has invested early in a wide range of great companies including King.com (Candy Crush maker), Houzz, Fizzback, The Foundry, Ubiquisys and more.
This follows the £2.7 million pre-seed round that it secured earlier this year. With this round, the total investment raised by the company accounts for £7.7 million.
Further, the investment also came from prominent angel investors, including Co-founder and former CTO of Xero Craig Walker, and Co-founder and former Managing Director of Xero UK, Gary Turner, as well as founders from fintech and accounting-tech leaders, such as GoCardless, Jeeves, Karbon, Libeo, ComplyAdvantage, Ignition, Hubdoc, and KashFlow.
Headquartered in London, Translucent enables businesses to continue to use the SMB solutions they currently use but unifies their financial data into a single location where it can be seen, used and edited. The UK-based startup is being used by businesses around the world, from software companies to restaurant groups to property developers.
The first app, ‘Search’, is available today, the second app ‘Group Reporting’ is now in Beta, and the third app ‘Live Sheets’ will soon be available to testers. The funding will be used to develop further apps including ‘Intercompany Transactions’, ‘BI & Analytics’ and ‘Financial Close’.
From chaos to clarity
The impact of globalisation and COVID-19 has dramatically accelerated the trend of companies becoming multinational or multi-entity earlier than ever before. However, SMB accounting systems are designed to hold the data of a single company in a single location, and this has forced finance teams to stitch together a patchwork of SMB accounting software which creates numerous problems including fragmented, siloed, and messy data.
Michael Wood, Founder and CEO of Translucent, commented: “Since announcing Translucent in March we have been delighted by the volume of interest we have received. This fundraising allows us to further build out our platform and solve the accounting and finance problems faced by multi-entity businesses.”
Mike Chalfen at Chalfen Ventures commented: “Translucent’s insight is that unified accounting data can be the basis of financial and operational insight for every multi-entity business. Michael is the best entrepreneur in the world to build a business based on this insight. And the opportunity to create a compound startup that drives insight for multi-entity businesses is huge; so joining the Translucent family fits perfectly into my mission of backing software startups whose technology will fundamentally alter the way companies operate.”
Remus Brett at LocalGlobe VC stated: “The demand from multinationals for Translucent is as significant as it is unsurprising. Michael and his team have built a platform that is solving a very real problem for an ever-growing number of businesses around the world, and we’re delighted to be backing him again.”
Multi-national businesses can unify financial data
Translucent was founded in 2022 by Michael Wood, who co-founded Dext, (formerly Receipt Bank), which was acquired by leading software investor Hg in 2021 in one of the UK’s largest SaaS exits. The platform allows multi-entity businesses to unify their financial data and workflows for the first time, by providing a suite of apps on top of existing accounting software such as Xero, QuickBooks and Sage.
It integrates with existing accounting solutions, stores all the data in a single location and harmonises the data to provide clients with a single financial system of record. It then provides a suite of apps to make use of the data; Apps include Group Reporting, Intercompany Transactions and Financial Close. Translucent will use the additional funding to build out its platform and suite of apps.
