The French payment specialist dedicated to businesses Qonto is now a unicorn, thanks to a giant fundraising of 484 million euros announced on Tuesday, and even claims to have become the biggest tricolor unicorn, with a company valuation of 4.4 billion euros.
“With this fundraising, one of the most significant in the history of French Tech, Qonto becomes the 24th unicorn in an ecosystem that continues to grow, in Paris and in the regions”, welcomed Cédric O, Secretary of State for Digital, in the statement released Tuesday by Qonto. Unicorn is a young, unlisted company valued at over $ 1 billion. The government’s goal is to go from three to 25 unicorns between 2017 and 2025.
The payment institution created in 2017 with the aim of making life easier for businesses, and in particular very small businesses and SMEs, raised a total of 622 million euros. Qonto thus claims a higher valuation than that posted last September by Sorare (3.8 billion euros) who created an online game for exchanging football player thumbnails based on emerging NFT technology.
This ranking is based on the valuations unveiled during fundraising for these unlisted unicorns, and therefore does not allow real-time comparison.
Quadruple hiring and reach one million customers by 2025
With this sum, Qonto wishes to improve its services by offering new features and improving its customer service (in particular by creating a hub in Barcelona), but also to continue its European expansion by investing 100 million euros in each of the four countries where it is present (France, Italy, Spain and Germany) and by setting up in new countries from 2023. “By 2025, it is expected that more than 75% of new customers will be acquired outside France”, announces Alexandre Prot , co-founder of Qonto.
The establishment also aims to quadruple the number of its employees by 2025, to 2,000, and to reach one million customers at the same time, against 220,000 today.