Danish Startup Pento Raises $2.8M

Danish startup Pento announced that it has raised $2.8 million in seed funding.

Point Nine Capital and Seedcamp led the round, with participation from smaller funds and angel investors, including Atomico partner Mattias Ljungman.

Founded in 2016 by CEO Jonas Bøgh Larsen and Chief Technology Officer Emil Hagbarth, the company offers a SaaS so companies can automate their payroll, as well as offer special features to employees. It had previously raised $700,000.

“Payroll is a very manual process for most companies, which causes errors and is super time-consuming,” Larsen told TechCrunch. “The process usually includes a lot of manual tasks like updating spreadsheets, sending emails with personal information, making manual bank transfers, manually keying in data from HR software, and much more. We have built a SaaS product that automates all of this.”

The platform includes features such as tax reporting, pension reporting, payslip generation, payouts to employees and tax authorities and bookkeeping. “[This] means payroll admins can run the whole payroll process in one single product, usually in a matter of minutes rather than hours,” adds Larsen.

Pento customers are usually companies with 1-150 employees, with the Pento charging “£3 per employee per month for our basic plan, and charge £7 per employee per month for more support and more features,” explained Larsen, who wrote in a blog post that hundreds of companies already use Pento to run payroll in Denmark, and the company has started inviting the first British companies on board from its UK waitlist.

“There is so much we can do to make payroll more efficient for companies, and more transparent, flexible, and user-friendly for employees. Full automation unlocks so many new ways for modern workplaces to give their employees the experiences they deserve. Building the best possible payroll workflow for companies and payroll admins is just the beginning — being an employee on the receiving end of payroll is still extremely intransparent and inflexible. We’re going to change that,” Larsen wrote.