Pennylane, Qonto, Agicap, Pleo and Mollie have one thing in common. they all use Chift in one way or another to manage integrations with other services. And this relatively young Belgium-based startup just raised a seed round of €2.3 million ($2.5 million at current exchange rates).
Many fintech startups rely on integrations to make their product work with their customers’ financial stack. They often end up creating countless connectors and partner integrations to keep financial information consistent across multiple products. As their integration ecosystem grows, they sometimes rely on an iPaaS (integration platform as a service) provider.
Chift essentially acts as a third-party integration expert. It works a little like encode in the UK and Bind in the US Instead of creating connectors one by one, Chift offers a set of unified APIs that support the most popular financial tools out there.
For example, Chift has developed an accounting API that is compatible with French accounting software from Sage, Cegid and Pennylane. The company has also developed integrations around billing tools, e-commerce platforms and point-of-sale software.
Chift has decided to focus on financial tools first. “We are integrating with tools that generate financial data,” co-founder and CEO Gauthier Henroz told TechCrunch.
Unlike other industries, the fintech market is still relatively fragmented: each European country has its own accounting or billing platforms. But it can be useful to be able to access financial data from any SaaS product.
As more companies start to rely on Chift, the startup will be able to add more connectors. All Chift customers can benefit from these new integrations. As an added benefit for Chift, it creates a barrier to entry for newcomers.
“In Europe, that’s where all the complexity lies. Things will be different in each country, particularly when it comes to accounting, point of sale and billing tools,” Henroz said.
“We help our clients, who then increase sales or open new markets. There is very little turnover because you are integrated, you are connected, you connect them with others and create new opportunities for them,” he added later in the conversation.
Developing an integration is not an isolated project either. Companies release updates to their APIs, which can lead to failures. Chift is in charge of maintaining these integrations. SaaS companies can focus on their core product instead of those integrations.
Investors in the seed round include Entourage (background by Pieterjan Bouten), Modelers (Philippe Teixeira da Mota fund), Seeder Fund and several business angels. “Our goal is to become the European leader,” Henroz said.