Qonto is the biggest French unicorn, after raising half a billion … but what does it do?

Registering the third largest fundraising campaign for French Tech, Qonto is now valued at 4.4 billion euros and targets one million self-employed and SME clients.

She doesn’t become a unicorn, but THE biggest French unicorn. The start-up specializing in payments dedicated to businesses Qonto announced on Tuesday that it had raised 484 million euros, confirming the excellent start to the year for French tech firms, after raising 254 million euros for PayFit and 250 million for Ankorstore, propelling the two start-ups to the rank of unicorns.

Record fundraising for a fintech

With its latest fundraising, the third largest in France behind those of Sorare (580 million euros in September 2021) and Mirakl (476 million euros in September 2021 as well), Qonto has once again won over investors. . The company, which was first considered as a neobank, has since asserted itself as a European leader in the financial management of companies (VSEs, SMEs, start-ups, independents and associations), with solutions around daily banking and including the financing, accounting and expense management of small businesses.

Qonto, founded in 2017 by Steve Anavi and Alexandre Prot, claims the place of the largest French unicorn, whose company valuation is estimated at 4.4 billion euros. Remember that a unicorn is a young company, a young shoot born in France, not listed on the stock exchange, whose company valuation is greater than a billion dollars.

What is absolutely certain is that Qonto’s latest fundraising is the most important for a French fintech, a start-up working in finance. It was led by US investment firms Tiger Global (which has previously invested in Facebook, LinkedIn, ByteDance, Waymo, Yandex, Softbank, Quora, Glassdor, Stripe or Coinbase) and TCV (which has backed Expedia, Facebook, GoDaddy , Airbnb, Payoneer, Spotify, Netflix or even ByteDance), as well as eight other new contributors, who notably join Tencent, which already supports the French company.

Qonto wants to invest in these foreign markets and does not rule out future acquisitions

Thanks to this funding round, Qonto is raising its ambitions. Already with 220,000 customers in France, Germany, Spain and Italy, the start-up wants to accelerate its growth in Europe and open up to other markets at the same time, by 2023. It aims by elsewhere the million SMEs and self-employed workers in Europe in 2025.

Qonto’s expansion into foreign markets is currently a success for the company, which says it has quadrupled its revenues over the past two years. Over the next two years, it should invest more than 100 million euros in each of its three current markets outside France, to accelerate its momentum and strengthen its relations with local partners and ecosystems. The start-up is targeting 75% of new customers acquired outside France by 2025.

The latest fundraising will also help Qonto enrich its service with new features and new partnerships, while not preventing itself from making acquisitions. Recruitment is also a very important project for fintech, which intends to quadruple its workforce and have 2,000 employees before 2025. Half of its future employees will be based in France. And ” we are only at the beginning of the adventure », Warns the co-founder and CEO of Qonto, Alexandre Prot.