Atlar, a Sweden-based FinTech automating business banking, has raised $5m in seed funding led by Index Ventures.
The round also saw participation from La Famiglia VC, Cocoa VC and a number of angel investors, including Revolut CFO Mikko Salovaara, former executive vice president of global sales at Adyen Thijn Lamers and N26 CFO Jan Kemper.
According to Atlar, every year, an estimated €260trn moves through European banks in the form of payouts, insurance premiums, deposits, loan payouts, and much more.
Staggeringly, the company said much of this is done manually: through payment files uploaded to banks, finance teams matching line items one by one with internal books, or hacked-together software solutions propped up by engineers.
While FinTech tools have provided innovation for companies when it comes to accepting payments and ‘open banking’, Atlar said that similar developments have not arrived to enable payments flows that begin in a company’s own bank accounts, this is what the startup is looking to change.
Atlar lets businesses connect to its platform via an API, which in turn connects to their banks.
Businesses’ can then automate all of their payment activities, including initiating transfers, reconciling transactions, handling direct debits, and more.
This reduces the labour demanded to maintain money flows and business records; in turn, that means payments don’t get skipped and man-hours are freed up for more consequential and strategic work, Atlar said.
The company already boasts a number of customers on its platform including, Lassie, an insurance company, Mynt, a payments company, and Banxware, a German FinTech lender. Nicolas Kipp, founder and COO at Banxware, said, “Having been through the pain of both building our own bank integrations and setting up a back office team, we were thrilled to partner with Atlar. Their platform gives us exactly what we need in order to handle our bank payments, which lets us focus on our core business.”
Earlier this year, small business banking platform Novo reached a $700m valuation following the close of its Series B round on $90m.
Copyright © 2022 FinTech Global
