Invest1 publisher3 min readPublished
Chift takes EUR10.5M to keep 120 connectors running for 150 software vendors
Chift's Series A prices Europe's mismatched accounting software as an asset. Whether the price holds depends on the engineering time each of its 120-plus connectors needs every year.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Chift, a Brussels fintech, closed a EUR10.5 million Series A to expand the software layer linking Europe's fragmented financial tools and to make it usable by AI applications.
- BlackFin Capital Partners, a European fintech specialist with more than EUR4 billion under management, led the financing.
- The product is one integration that opens onto more than 120 financial products across accounting, invoicing, cash register, shop platform, payment provider and property-management categories.
Compiled by The InvestorSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- decision The rental price Chift can charge each of its 150 software customers is bounded by what an in-house integration engineer would cost that vendor, so pricing power is set by their salary bill.
- capability An AI vendor can now ship a bookkeeping or payments feature without writing a single accounting integration, because the agent posts through Chift's permission layer instead.
- exposure When a connector breaks, the failure surfaces as unsent invoices or stale balances inside products sold by Revolut, Qonto, Pennylane and Mollie, whose customers never contracted with Chift.
- precedent A lead ticket inside a round worth about 0.26% of BlackFin's assets is a cheap option on European connectivity, and a ticket that cheap invites more investments in the same category.
Chift says revenue has grown more than tenfold since it raised EUR2.3M in seed capital in 2024 [12]. Ten times EUR300,000 is EUR3m, and ten times EUR2m is EUR20m. The company did not disclose revenue, pricing or a valuation. Total disclosed funding is now EUR12.8M [2], and against about 35 staff [13] that is roughly EUR300,000 raised per employee [1].
The single integration opens onto more than 120 financial products in six categories [5], an average of 20 per category [4]. Every one of those products is somebody else's API on somebody else's release schedule. Management says it intends to reduce the manual work required to switch on each connector [16]. If maintenance hours per connector stay flat while the catalogue grows, payroll grows with it.
More than 150 software companies use the platform to reach over 50,000 small and mid-sized businesses in more than ten European countries [14], about 333 businesses per vendor [3]. The vendors are the customers. Revolut, Qonto, Pennylane and Mollie are named among the users [15].
BlackFin led the round and manages more than EUR4bn [2], so EUR10.5M is about 0.26% of the assets it runs [5]. Pauline Brunel, an investment director at the firm, described the difficulty of reaching data held in systems that were never designed to interoperate as the source of Chift's value, according to Crowdfund Insider [11][10][20]. The other participants were Entourage, Shapers, Seeder Fund and Wallonie Entreprendre, all existing backers [3].
Electronic invoicing rules are pushing more commercial paperwork onto digital rails, and that only works if systems can exchange data cleanly [7]. A mandate that converges formats also shrinks the per-ledger differences Chift is paid to absorb, in the categories carrying the most documents. The agent side runs the other way. An agent that books entries or triggers payments [8] fails differently from a dashboard that reads a balance. Chift has added a Model Context Protocol server so agents can pull and push data across its network while the platform handles authentication and permissions [9].
Gauthier Henroz founded the company in 2022 with Henry Hertoghe and Matthieu Hertoghe [4]. He has framed interoperability as the core constraint of small business finance as firms stack more tools and as AI and e-invoicing rewrite how money is recorded [18]. The target is to be the default financial connectivity layer for European business software by 2028 [17], about 16 months from this round to the start of that year [6]. Renewals would prove the thesis wrong: if the larger vendors start building their own connectors, the platform is an outsourcing contract they can end. Chift's own position is that the winner treats connectivity as infrastructure, built once and maintained centrally for software and agents alike, across a 27-country patchwork [19].
What to watch
- Chift's connector count against its headcount at the next raise: 120-plus products maintained by about 35 people is the ratio to re-check.
- Whether BlackFin's own ticket inside the EUR10.5M becomes visible in a later filing, since the round was led rather than solely funded.
- Whether the country count moves past ten, and how many new connectors each added market required.