Financial technology software company Enfuce completed and signed an agreement for a total capital investment of EUR 45 million during the Slush growth company event.
The goal was to release the funding already during the event, but the final adjustment and signatures eventually dragged on a bit.
“Now we finally got to meet investors face to face. Slush had a good framework for that, ”said Enfuce, co-founder and commercial director Denise Johansson says.
The main investor in the financing round was the European private equity fund Vitruvian Partners. Investors also included Chinese technology company Tencent, domestic Maki.vc and the company’s other previous investors.
Tencent made its previous investment in Enfuce in March after Enfuce raised € 5 million in funding.
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“Now we finally got to meet investors face to face. Slush had a good framework for that. ”
Enfuce is a financial technology company founded in 2016 that develops a payment and card payment platform for banks and companies.
The company’s platform already handles EUR 1 billion in payment transactions a year and has more than 13 million active payment card users on its platform. Enfuce recently expanded its operations to Germany and France.
What is new about the company’s technology is, among other things, that it took the card and payment platform to the public cloud service. It makes the service more scalable, which means speed and agility. In a tightly regulated banking sector, operations must still meet the requirements of the Financial Supervisory Authority.
Payment the upheaval has accelerated the growth of financial technology companies. Last summer, for example, the Estonian payment services company Wise (formerly Transferwise) was listed on the London Stock Exchange. Several international journals have described the year 2021 a record year for IPOs in the financial sector. Other industry listers this year have included Stripe, Klarna and Marqeta.
The heat of the market has also been noticed by the Finnish Enfuce.
“Now, during the autumn, we have received six acquisition offers at the same time. Some have been large US companies in the industry that would have wanted to grow rapidly in Europe through trade. There have also been traditional payment card vendors who would have wanted the technology ready instead of starting to build a cloud-based service themselves, ”said Enfuce’s co-founder and CEO. Monika Liikamaa says.
Until a couple of years ago, acquisition offers could have been of interest. Not anymore. The company sees its own growth as a greater opportunity in how it believes it can change the industry.
“We want to make it listed ourselves within a few years. I have said that we will do an IPO before I turn 50, and now I am 46, ”says Liikamaa.
This goal also influenced investor choice. Vitruvian is a large international private equity firm that was also an investor in Transferwise and Marqeta prior to their listing.
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“During the autumn, we have received six acquisition offers at the same time.”
Before stock exchange, the company still aims to take big growth leaps in its net sales. It is also likely that it will still need one or two larger rounds of private equity to support rapid international growth..
In 2020, Enfuce’s net sales increased to EUR 6.9 million, compared to EUR 5.1 million in the previous year. The company made a loss of 1.2 million euros and has one hundred employees.
According to Liikamaa, the company’s turnover for the current year will be approximately eight million euros.
“This year we have grown by all measures. Since the last round of funding, we hired a marketing team, and it has paid off. We have now gained as many customers in seven months as we have in the first four years. Now that we are a more established company and more than five years old, many traditional banking players have started to contact us, as we are already a credible player in the industry, ”says Johansson.
A large part of Enfuce’s turnover comes from the Nordic countries, but it also has customers in France, the United Kingdom and Germany. Next, it aims to grow through more active sales and expanding its technological offering.
“Until now, our sales have been primarily in response to future contacts from us. Now we’re going to genuinely push. At the same time, we are preparing for expansion outside Europe, ”says Johansson.
Before Entrepreneurship The founders of Enfuce worked together in the Bank of Åland’s subsidiary and built a card platform there. Excess left the bank, began to ripen a business idea and attracted former colleagues to join him.
Because Enfuce has an interface for card purchases, it is possible to build a service on it that calculates this carbon footprint of the consumer. For example, Enfuce’s banking customers can integrate My Carbon Action into their mobile applications. The app also provides suggestions for more environmentally friendly consumer choices.
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