Invest1 publisher3 min readPublished
BlackFin bets 10.5 million euros on Chift to connect Europe's fragmented accounting systems
Chift's Series A takes its total funding to 12.8 million euros on a catalogue of 120 financial systems built by 35 people. The platforms paying for those connectors are also the ones best placed to write them.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Chift, based in Brussels, has raised a 10.5 million euro Series A led by the European fintech investor BlackFin Capital Partners, three years after it was founded to connect European business software.
- The company says revenue has grown more than tenfold since it raised capital in 2024, and that it now serves over 50,000 SME clients.
- Its single API reaches more than 120 financial systems, covering accounting, invoicing, point of sale, e-commerce, payments and property management.
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Why it matters
- exposure Chift's best-known customers are also the companies most able to build the same connectors, so its revenue base and its main competitive threat are the same accounts.
- constraint The ceiling on what Chift can charge is whatever a platform would spend writing and maintaining accounting integrations itself, and that cost falls as tooling improves.
- contradiction The market sizing quoted in the round measures embedded-finance revenue earned at the platforms, not fees paid for integration, so it does not bound what this business can earn.
- decision On 12.8 million euros raised in total, Chift is buying depth in continental European accounting and leaving the US bank and lender underwriting market that Codat has 172 million dollars to pursue.
Thirty-five people maintain connectors into more than 120 financial systems [12][5]. The worked example in the announcement is an invoicing platform whose users file into 40 different accounting programmes without anyone writing 40 integrations [9]. Accounting is therefore about a third of the catalogue [2]. The 10.5 million euros comes to roughly 300,000 euros for each person now on the payroll [1], or about 210 euros for each of the 50,000-plus SME clients already sitting on the far end of those connectors [4].
The market sizes cited come from a different line item. Adyen puts addressable embedded-finance revenue for B2B SaaS platforms at 185 billion dollars and reckons less than a fifth of it is captured [10]. That leaves more than 148 billion dollars uncaptured [3]. McKinsey has Europe's embedded finance market above 116 billion dollars by 2030 [11]. Both figures measure money earned by the platforms doing the embedding. Chift charges those platforms for access. The announcement does not include a valuation or a revenue figure, only growth of more than tenfold since the 2024 seed [3].
Two things pull the demand. EU e-invoicing rules will require every small and medium-sized enterprise to digitise its financial operations [13], and Pennylane, one of Chift's customers, raised 200 million dollars this year [15][6]. Then the agents. Pauline Brunel, investment director at BlackFin Capital Partners, said that "agents are only as good as the data they can access" [16].
Gauthier Henroz, co-founder and chief executive, said: "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." [7] In this round the connectivity and the AI are one purchase. Brunel's case for the connectors is the data the agents need [16], and the money goes on European market expansion plus AI-driven integrations that set themselves up instead of being configured by hand [17].
Techfundingnews.com puts the key challenge as whether Chift can remain independent if the accounting platforms and neobanks it works with choose to build their own integrations [18]. Codat, in London, sells to banks and lenders underwriting small-business credit in the United States and the United Kingdom [19]. Merge.dev offers one API across HR, recruiting and accounting for American SaaS companies [20]. Chift stays with the details of continental European accounting [21].
I would take the depth bet at this size. A connector costs once per system and earns per customer, so 120 systems spread over 50,000 SME clients [5][3] undercuts an in-house build until one platform's own volume covers the build. The Series A is 4.6 times the 2.3 million euro seed [5], and the 12.8 million euro total is exactly those two rounds added together [6][14], leaving no room for an undisclosed bridge in between. Henroz says he wants Chift to be Europe's leading financial connectivity platform by 2028 [22].
The thesis fails in two ways. One of the four named platforms starts publishing its own connector list and the tenfold growth curve flattens. Or the self-configuring integrations work well enough that customers run them without Chift.
What to watch
- Whether the connector count grows faster than headcount once the self-configuring integrations ship.
- Whether the next raise comes with an absolute revenue figure instead of a growth multiple.
- Whether Codat or Merge.dev starts selling into continental European accounting systems.