PayPal-Backed Formance Raises $21 Million to Grow Open-Source Ledger

Open-source financial infrastructure provider Formance raised $21 million in a Series A funding round to grow its Ledger and other solutions that help developers build financial flows and products.

The funding round was co-led by PayPal Ventures and Portage and came after a 12-month period in which Formance increased its revenue by 10 times, according to a Wednesday (Jan. 29) press release.

“This new funding will fuel Formance’s expansion across the U.S. and Europe and accelerate its vision of transforming its Open Source Ledger into a full-scale platform for building and managing sophisticated financial features,” Formance Co-Founder Anne-Sybille Pradelles said in the release.

Formance’s open source, programmable and vendor-agnostic solution is designed to simplify the process of building financial infrastructure, allowing companies to do so faster and with fewer resources, according to the release.

The company’s core product, its programmable Ledger, provides detailed visibility into every transaction and streamlines reconciliation with any type of financial partner, the release said.

Formance’s solution is used by large-scale vertical software-as-a-service (SaaS) platforms, FinTechs, financial institutions and other global customers, per the release.

One user of the solution, Liberis Vice President of Engineering Tito Sarrionandia, said in the release: “Formance enabled us to ship new lending products faster by providing a customizable foundation that let us reliably express the complexities of our flow of funds and domain specifics.”

Formance raised $3.1 million in its first funding round in June 2022.

PayPal Ventures has announced several investments in recent months.

On Jan. 16, the company helped InsurTech Olé Life raise $13 million in a Series B funding round, allowing Olé Life to boost its growth across Latin America by establishing local operations in key markets and introducing new products beyond life insurance.

In December, PayPal Ventures participating in a Series B round in which fraud prevention/compliance platform Bureau raised $30 million to use artificial intelligence to help businesses combat sophisticated forms of fraud.

PayPal Ventures announced an additional investment in Chaos Labs, a company providing blockchain risk management, in September. PayPal Ventures said at the time that Chaos Labs would receive the investment in PayPal’s stablecoin, PYUSD, on-chain.