While several fintechs are laying off employees in a gloomy economic context and following a large number of hires, a French start-up manages to raise funds and achieve unicorn status. Younited, which specializes in consumer credit, announced on Thursday December 8, 2022 that it had raised 60 million euros. This fundraising, which is carried out with its main shareholders, which are Eurazeo, Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, Large Venture (Bpifrance) and Goldman Sachs, values the start-up at 1.1 billion euros.
A profitable historical activity
Younited offers instant credit solutions to individuals for amounts of up to 50,000 euros. It is present in France, in Italy, Spain, Portugal and Germany. The start-up explains that it is doing well since it should achieve 70% growth in the production of new credits (GMV for gross merchandise value) in 2022 to reach 1.6 billion euros.
And its total revenues are expected to increase by 54% to reach 190 million euros. The start-up ensures that its historical activity of instant credit to individuals has been profitable in France since 2019 and in Italy since 2021, and that it will be so in all 5 countries this year in 2022 (Spain, Portugal and Germany in more).
Strengthen partnerships
“While the historic activity of Younited (Direct-to-Consumer) has been profitable since this year in all of our 5 countries, this new fundraising will allow us to continue to invest in our disruptive technology and in data. as well as in the deployment of our second activity (Partnerships) launched recently”explains Charles Egly, chairman of the management board and co-founder of Younited.
The unicorn has actually accelerated in its partnerships division in recent years: the start-up offers merchants and financial institutions the opportunity to use its technologies and expertise to deploy an instant credit solution on their platforms. For instance, the start-up has entered into a partnership with Orange Bank who wanted to benefit from its account aggregation technology, which is essential for quickly studying and responding to consumer credit applications. In just a few clicks, a customer can share their bank account history which is then scrutinized by Younited’s various algorithms in order to study whether the loan can be granted to them and at what rate.
With this fundraising, Younited wants to continue on these two axes of development in all the countries where it is present. The French fintech seems to be doing well unlike others like Klarna, Stripe, PayPal, Chime, Chargebee or Upstart who are laying off many people. Fintechs raised a lot of money in 2021. With these funds, some have hired, probably too quickly, many people. But the money is harder to find today and fintechs, like other tech companies, are forced to lay off workers.
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