“The whole digitization and automation of finance processes has been going on for a while,” Jeppe Rindom, CEO and co-founder of Pleo, told CNBC.
The pandemic helped the Denmark-based company grow as digital services became a necessity, Rindom said. The need for people to work remotely helped offset a drop in international business travel. The company more than doubled its user base last year to 17,000, he said.
Pleo’s revenue is largely from credit card interchange fees — about 70 percent — while paid subscriptions bring in the rest.
The company has raised $228.8 million to date and is planning to use the fresh round of capital to grow its presence in the U.K. and increase its marketing and public relations efforts. Currently, Pleo works across Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Britain and Ireland.
Pleo is among the numerous FinTechs to raise money at a high valuation. By way of example, Sweden’s Klarna was valued at $45.6 billion. Checkout.com has a $15 billion valuation following a January fundraise. Mollie is now valued at $6.5 billion.
Advertisement: Scroll to Continue
“I think we’ve only seen the beginning,” Rindom told CNBC. “Obviously we have some awesome players like Wise, Revolut, Adyen and Klarna, some of which are moving into double-digit billion valuations.”
“If you compare it to the value of the whole banking industry, it’s still very small,” he added. “This is going to take time — we’re talking about a couple of decades. But I do think that the players that are customer-first and technology-first will win the whole financial industry in the long run.”
In April, the company added additional business services for invoice management, with a free GBP to GBP payment solution that gives users the ability to pay their invoices and schedule payments in the bills interface.
