Expense reports are torture for most people, bureaucratic for companies, and nobody is happy in the end. At least that’s what the Danish fintech Pleo relies on, which advertises with an intelligent company card and accounting software as a solution. Users should pay with their bank card and then take a picture of the receipt in an app – the software will then take care of the rest, according to the start-up.
Pleo currently has more than 17,000 customers. Now the fintech has also been able to convince investors with this idea and collect a total of 150 million US dollars (127 million euros), like them Southgerman newspaper learned in advance. According to the company, the fintech’s valuation rises to a total of 1.7 billion US dollars (1.43 billion euros). This means that Pleo will be able to refer to himself as a unicorn in the future. This is what the start-up and investor scene calls young companies that are valued at over a billion dollars or euros. In Germany, for example, the smartphone bank N26, the asset manager Scalable Capital or the insurance start-up Wefox are unicorns.
According to its own statements, Pleo is the first Danish company to become a billion-dollar company in this financing phase. Money for this rise came from US investment giants Thrive Capital and Bain Capital Ventures, who led the financing round. The total invested debt is almost $ 230 million (193 million euros).
The location in Berlin is to be expanded
Germany is considered a key market for the Danes. Pleo has been represented in Berlin since 2019 and wants to give the location a special position in further expansion. Up to 40 of the 330 employees already work in Berlin, and in the future there will be twice as many.
In this country, the start-up is primarily a service provider for other start-ups as well as small and medium-sized companies, of which it currently counts 1,600 as customers, 200 are currently added every month. The app also has several special features for the German market, for example the inclusion of the mileage allowance.
“Germany is the second most important market after Great Britain, and currently 25 percent of our new business comes from Germany,” says Jeppe Rindom, co-founder and CEO of Pleo der SZ. He founded Pleo together with Niccolo Perra in 2015. Both of them were already active in the start-up world and employees of the start-up Tradeshift, a social network for companies.
In the future, Pleo wants to expand into other European countries in addition to the six countries in which it is already active. However, it is not aiming for the USA or the stock exchange in the short term. “First we want to win where we are,” says co-founder Jeppe Rindom. In the medium term, he does not want to rule out an expansion to another continent or an IPO.