Swile, a French fintech startup founded a couple of years back has secured €70 million in Series C funding. The round was led by Index Ventures, which was also lead investor for a previous €30 million round in 2019. Bpifrance, Idinvest has also joined the latest round for the scale-up led by Loïc Soubeyrand. The Series C round brings the total funding raised since Swile’s launch in 2018 to €115 million.
Plans to extend beyond meal vouchers and lunch break experiences!
The new funding will enable the French fintech to expand internationally starting with Brazil and to diversify the product offering. It’s worth mentioning that, Swile has plans to extend beyond meal vouchers and lunch break experiences, with a new product that enables corporate gifts to be distributed to employees using the same system, and the addition of features to improve life at work and employee engagement.
Loïc Soubeyrand, Swile’s founder and CEO comments: “This new round of funding will allow us to ambitiously diversify our product offering and expand internationally after our success in France. Our market opportunity is global, resilient, and growing rapidly. The recent sanitary crisis has highlighted the fundamental corporate switch towards digital employee benefits, as well as the importance of promoting and maintaining team cohesiveness, which will create new opportunities for Swile’s global growth in the future”.
Replaced the outdated paper voucher with digital solution!
Founded in 2018 by French serial entrepreneur Loïc Soubeyrand, Swile offers digital solutions for employee rewards and benefits (meal vouchers and corporate gifts) through a card and an app that also helps foster engagement.
The startup replaced the traditional and outdated French paper meal voucher market with a digital solution that works with the VISA and Mastercard networks.
8K corporate customers and 210K active users!
Notably, it allowed users to pay for the precise amount of their purchases by adding a personal payment method to their account. At present, the company has 230 employees in 8 cities with 8K corporate customers and 210K active users.
Martin Mignot, Partner at Index Ventures: The emergence of new ways of working is forcing companies to adopt digital solutions to improve employee engagement and team cohesiveness, wherever they are. Swile makes it easier for businesses to care for an increasingly disparate workforce by providing tailored benefits through an easy-to-use, pre-paid card, and app. This creates additional spend in restaurants and other small businesses, which in turn supports local communities. As countries around the world seek new ways to support employees and help their hospitality industries recover from the Coronavirus pandemic, governments are increasingly recognising the potential benefits of meal vouchers and similar schemes.
Charlotte Corbaz, director at Bpifrance’s Large Venture, also comments: “We are delighted to be joining the Swile adventure and looking forward to supporting their leadership in this new phase. Swile is fully in line with Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund strategy, which is to support hyper-growth companies”.
After our first investment during Series A in 2018, Swile has shown an exceptional growth trajectory. The team grew from 15 to 200 people while keeping operational excellence and agility in what they do. We are convinced that Swile’s potential can take them to an IPO and a billion-dollar valuation at some point,” says Jonathan Userovici, who coordinated this round at Idinvest Partners.
Main image credit: Swile
