The French specialist in payments dedicated to companies Qonto has become a unicorn, and even the biggest French unicorn, thanks to a giant fundraising of 486 million euros which values the company 4.4 billion euros, she said. announced Tuesday.
With this levy, one of the most consistent in the history of French Tech, Qonto becomes the 24th unicorn (a young unlisted company valued at more than a billion dollars, Editor’s note) of a growing ecosystem. , Paris as in the territories, welcomed Cdric O, Secretary of State in charge of digital, quoted in the press release published by Qonto, recalling the government’s objective of going from three 25 unicorns between 2017 and 2025.
Qonto, created in 2017, thus claims a higher valuation than that posted last September by Sorare, who created an online game for exchanging football player thumbnails based on emerging NFT technology: Sorare had announced a valuation 4.3 billion dollars (3.8 billion euros), following a record fundraising for French tech of 680 million dollars (580 million euros).
After Payfit, Lydia …
This ranking is based on the valuations revealed during fundraising of these unlisted unicorns, and therefore does not allow for real-time comparison. More recently, it was payroll manager Payfit and mobile payment specialist Lydia who had achieved unicorn status. In September, Cdric O said he hoped to see a French start-up enter the CAC 40 by 2025.
With this new windfall, Qonto wishes to improve its services by offering new features and improving its customer service (in particular by creating a Barcelona hub) 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.
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By 2025, it is expected that more than 75% of new customers will be acquired outside France, announces AFP 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 by the same horizon, against 220,000 today.
The Qonto bank account
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