Key takeaways
- Atlar raised a €5 million seed round led by Index Ventures, with participation from La Famiglia VC, Cocoa VC, and angel investors including Revolut CFO Mikko Salovaara, former Adyen VP Thijn Lamers, and N26 CFO Jan Kemper.
- The article estimates that €260 trillion moves through European banks each year, much of it still handled manually via payment-file uploads, line-by-line matching, or internally built software.
- Businesses connect to Atlar through an API that connects to their banks, enabling automation of payment flows including initiating transfers, reconciling transactions, and handling direct debits.
- Early customers named in the article include Lassie, Mynt, and Banxware; Banxware's founder and COO said the platform handles bank payments so the company can focus on its core business.
Every year, an estimated €260 trillion moves through European banks in the form of payouts, insurance premiums, deposits, loan payouts, and much more. Staggeringly, 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 new fintech tooling has enabled businesses to more easily accept bank payments, take open banking for example, similar innovation has not yet taken place with regards to payment flows that begin in a company’s own bank accounts.
This is where Atlar comes in. Businesses connect to our platform through an API, which in turn connects to their banks. This enables the end-to-automation of any payment flow including initiating transfers, reconciling transactions, handling direct debits, and more. This reduces the hours required to manually maintain money flows and business records and, in turn, reduces errors and frees up time for higher-value work.
We're proud to already have a strong cohort of early customers on our platform including innovative scale-ups like Lassie, an app-based insurance provider, Mynt, a leading spend management platform, and Banxware, a Berlin-based embedded lending platform. Nicolas Kipp, founder and COO at Banxware, sums it up nicely: “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."
The round was led by Index Ventures – a firm that has previously backed category defining companies such as Adyen, Revolut, Figma, and many more. They were joined by La Famiglia VC, Cocoa VC, and a number of angel investors, including Revolut CFO Mikko Salovaara, former Adyen VP Thijn Lamers, and N26 CFO Jan Kemper.
Johannes, Joel, and I are very excited about the years ahead. If you’d like to join us on this journey, or if you work at one of the many companies that face the challenges we're solving for, then reach out, we’d love to hear from you.
