Société Générale to sell its freelancer challenger bank Shine to Ageras | TechCrunch – Techcrunch
Four years after shopping Shine, a French fintech startup that provides bank accounts to freelancers and in reality tiny firms, Société Générale has presented plans to sell Shine to Ageras.
In 2020, TechCrunch reported that Société Générale spent around €100 million to accomplish Shine. It wasn’t a broad acquisition but it indubitably attracted somewhat a piece of protection on the time as it turned into more than staunch a technological or skills deal. Société Générale isn’t a name that comes up very customarily in tech startup acquisition recordsdata.
In transient, the monetary establishment wished to copy BoursoBank’s success in on-line banking — but this time with freelancer and enterprise banking. With this day’s recordsdata, the French banking huge admits that it never if truth be told realized what to enact with Shine.
As for Ageras, you acquired’t be familiar with the corporate but it indubitably has been a consolidator within the fintech and accounting home for the past few years. The Danish company turned into essentially based in 2012 as an on-line marketplace that matches tiny businesses with accountants and bookkeepers.
More honest no longer too lengthy within the past, the startup repositioned its offering. It now desires to make an all-in-one fintech platform for tiny businesses that covers banking, accounting, tax filing, etc.
The company additionally raised $73 million in 2021 and one other $88 million in April 2024 (€82 million), which method that it has a ton of cash for acquisitions. Ageras acquired Billy and Salary in Denmark, Tellow within the Netherlands, Zervant, a pan-European invoicing product and Kontist, a German challenger bank for freelancers. It has additionally developed Meneto, an accounting product for freelancers that rings a bell in my memory of Indy in France.
As that you simply would possibly perhaps judge, Ageras is building a portfolio of firms that offer adjoining products. In quite so a lot of how, Kontist, Tellow and now Shine roughly offer the identical product. When you create an memoir, you win an IBAN and a card. You would create invoices, receive money from your purchasers, win reminders when it’s time to pay your taxes and generate accounting exports.
This M&A methodology is a come to diversify the corporate’s footprint in Europe as fintech tranquil stays a fragmented market — there are some outliers that arrange to successfully attract prospects in more than one countries but those are exceptions.
Shine currently has more than 100,000 prospects whereas Ageras serves 300,000 prospects in Denmark, France, Germany and the Netherlands. In 2023, Ageras reported €31.7 million in income ($34 million at this day’s replace rate).
Ageras and Société Générale dangle signed an authentic acquisition settlement. Whereas terms of the deal remain undisclosed, Ageras says that it expects to close the transaction at some level at some stage within the main semester of 2025. Ageras plans to keep all of Shine’s staff and activities.
