French B2B Payments Platform Hero Raises $12.4M

Seven months after its launch, French FinTech Hero has raised €12.4 million ($12.49 million) to scale its B2B payments solution.

According to a Wednesday (July 13) report by FinTech Magazine, Hero’s payment solution is geared toward small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which the company argues are underserved by traditional banks.

To serve those customers, Hero said it is building a payments platform that lets business customers take care of both sides of a transaction, including procure-to-pay for clients and order-to-cash for suppliers.

“Hero started out as an intermediary to B2B transactions, taking on the financial and credit risk of both counterparties and helping them optimize their cash flows,” founder Roland Jais-Nielsen told FinTech Magazine.

“We quickly realized that lowering cost-to-transact for SMEs also implied better underwriting, centralizing all sales channels and payment methods, third-party integration, and end-to-end automation. We built Hero around this holistic vision.”

Read more: BlackFin Closes €350M Fund for European FinTechs, InsurTechs

In other recent B2B funding news, BlackFin Capital Partners announced Monday (July 11) a second closing, for €350 million ($351 million), of its Tech 2 fund, which is dedicated to FinTechs and InsurTechs in Europe.

The fund is now twice the size of its predecessor, and will soon be invested in other companies.

The company’s first fund, Tech 1, raised €178 million as of July 2018. That fund invested in 17 European tech companies.

The first investment for the new fund has already been made in Descartes Underwriting, a B2B InsurTech from Paris that deals with commercial insurance.

Related: AgriTech Market Vegrow Raises $25M for Expansion

Also Monday, Vegrow, an Indian B2B AgriTech fruit marketplace, announced its plans to expand following a $25 million Series B funding round.

Founded in 2020, Vegrow connects multiple players in the fruit business, working with wholesalers, semi-wholesalers, modern trade and general trade and more than 20,000 farmers.

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