French startup Swile has raised a $200 million Series D funding round led by SoftBank International Group. With this funding round, the startup has now reached unicorn status, meaning that Swile has a valuation of $1 billion or more. Swile provides a payment card for employee benefits, such as meal vouchers, gift cards and sustainable mobility vouchers.

Michel Combes, SoftBank International Group’s President (pictured left), is joining Swile’s board. Some of the startup’s existing investors are participating once again, such as Eurazeo, Index Ventures and Bpifrance. Headline is also investing in Swile for the first time.

This is a significant round for the company as it keeps raising bigger rounds year after year. Swile raised a Series A round of $17.4 million (€15 million) in 2018, a Series B round of $34.7 million (€30 million) in 2019 and a Series C round of $81 million (€70 million) in 2020.

Swile started as a payment card to hold your meal vouchers. In France, companies have to contribute to lunch when it’s in the middle of a work day. Some companies offer a cafeteria with cheap meals, others hand out meal vouchers that you can spend in restaurants and bakeries.

But the experience is a bit confusing when you’re paying for lunch. Employees often ask whether a restaurant accepts meal vouchers. And if you want to spend more than your daily budget, you have to use two cards.

With Swile, employees can optionally add their personal debit card to the Swile app. When you spend more than your daily limit, Swile automatically charges your personal card. It’s a better experience for the end user.

And this product alone has been quite successful. Just four years after launch, Swile has captured a 13% market share on meal vouchers in France. It competes with well-established companies, such as Edenred, UpDéjeuner, Sodexo’s Pass Restaurant and Apetiz. Swile generates revenue on interchange fees.

In addition to small and medium companies, the startup has managed to convince bigger clients, such as supermarket chain Carrefour and its 65,000 employees in France. Other clients include Doctolib, Spotify and Airbnb in France.

“Our bet with Swile — as we disclosed it 18 months ago — is that we want to go beyond lunch and manage employee benefits with the Swile card. It should help you manage all your employee benefits,” Swile founder and CEO Loïc Soubeyrand told me.

For instance, employee representatives usually offer gift cards for the end of the year. Instead of handing out paper checks, the employee representative bodies can top up the Swile card with those gift cards. After that, the employee can use the same card for lunch and for Christmas presents. Swile has acquired Sweevana for that part of the business.

Similarly, Swile will soon let you pay for ride-sharing, public transport subscriptions or bike rides between your home and your office. In France, this is a nascent market as companies will have to contribute to sustainable mobility spendings starting on January 1st.

“This is what’s great with unification. You don’t need five different cards to manage five different benefits,” Soubeyrand said. And companies don’t need five solutions with five different suppliers either.

Image Credits: Swile

From a super card to a super app

Beyond the Swile card and its transactional revenue, the startup wants to build an app to improve internal communications, run anonymous surveys and gather feedback from employees. This could open up some revenue opportunities with a software-as-a-service approach and monthly subscriptions.

The company has been testing its app in beta for the last 12 months and it should be available to Swile clients soon. Swile has acquired Briq for its expertise on that area.

In the future, small companies could also imagine managing their corporate spending from Swile. You don’t necessarily need a full-fledged, separate solution to manage expenses when you’re just getting started.

Up next, Swile also has ambitious international goals. Brazil is by far the biggest market when it comes to employee benefits. With the acquisition of Vee Benefícios, Swile now has 120 employees in São Paulo and it wants to turn Brazil into its main market.

By 2022, Swile wants to hire 500 employees — the company will double in size. There will be more international expansions as well. Mexico looks like another promising market for instance. Even if those international bets take time to pay off, Swile is still just getting started in its home market. It still has a tiny market share and a lot of room for growth.

Image Credits: Swile

Meet Graneet, a French startup that just raised a $2.8 million seed round (€2.4 million) led by Point Nine and Fondamental. Graneet is a vertical software-as-a-service startup focused on the construction industry and the myriad of small and medium companies in this industry specifically.

It wants to build the definitive financial management solution so that construction companies can better control their projects. The vast majority of construction companies still rely on multiple Excel files, which leads to information silos and cumbersome data entry tasks.

The mother of Graneet’s co-founder and CEO Jean-Gabriel Niel has been leading a construction company. “She would tell me ‘this is crazy, I can’t figure out whether I’m going to gain or lose money for one out of two construction projects,’” he told me.

He spent some time looking at this company’s internal processes — order processing, billing management, you name it. And that’s when he realized that Microsoft Excel was still the leading solution.

With Graneet, the company thinks it needs to solve three basic things — quotes, billing and resource planning. The startup first started working on billing. Graneet acts as a single source of truth where you can see how much your client is supposed to pay, how much you’ve received so far and what’s next. You can see if there are any outstanding invoices and mark them as paid.

The company then started working on quotes and lead generation. Graneet lets you create quotes directly from the platform. Once the client has approved your quote, you can go back when your construction project is well on its way and enter a percentage of completion — this is a key metric in this industry.

Finally, with today’s funding round, Graneet wants to develop the third part of its product, which is resource planning. Soon, you’ll be able to manage subcontractors from Graneet and divide an invoice into multiple parts for multiple contractors.

Graneet clients will be able to invite subcontractors to the platform. They won’t be able to see everything, but they’ll be able to see what they’re working on. Similarly, if you’re a Graneet client and you work for a bigger company as a subcontractor, you’ll be able to send monthly progress reports. That should definitely help when it comes to finding new clients for the product.

Later down the road, Graneet thinks it can also offer more services to its existing customers. For instance, many construction companies work with factoring companies — these companies buy outstanding invoices and pay them right away for cash flow reasons. Graneet could also provide advance payments on the platform directly.

That’s just one example of how Graneet could be helpful. The idea is that construction companies are currently under-equipped when it comes to software solutions. If Graneet can prove that it can fill that gap, there will be a lot of product opportunities.

Image Credits: Graneet

Mindee offers an API that lets you turn raw data in a paper document into structured data. The startup is coming out of stealth mode and has raised a $14 million Series A round led by GGV Capital.

Other investors in today’s funding round include Alven, Serena Capital, Bpifrance’s Digital Venture fund as well as several business angels, such as Algolia co-founder Nicolas Dessaigne and Datadog co-founder Alexis Lê-Quôc.

If you’re working on a product that involves saving paper receipts, scanning driver licenses or entering invoices in a system, chances are you’ve been looking at ways to automate that process as much as possible. Many companies rely on OCR services (optical character recognition) from Google or Amazon.

But turning text into raw digital text isn’t the most complicated step. After that, you want to turn raw digital text into structured data. This is much more complicated as companies often rely on humans to identify the right information and paste it in the right data field.

Essentially, you can process a photo through Mindee API and turn it into relevant data for your product without any manual data entry. Many industries could use this kind of API-based product, from expense management to procurement, accounting, loan applications and more.

Some of Mindee’s clients include Qonto, Payfit, Spendesk and Lucca. With the new funding, the startup plans to get more customers in Europe and expand to the U.S.

Behind the scenes, the company has trained its algorithms using machine learning on large data sets of documents. It is supposed to get better over time as it processes more documents. The company already processes millions of pages every month from its customers.

The startup charges its clients based on volume. Once you go over the free tier, you get charged per processed page. And because it’s a hosted API, integrating Mindee in your product doesn’t require a ton of changes in your product. You call an API and receive structured data in return.

What makes Mindee special is that the experience for the end user is much better. For instance, when you try to sign up to a service that requires your passport information, you usually have to enter your personal information, take a photo and wait. It’ll ping someone so that they can make sure it’s the same information in the registration system and on the photo.

If Mindee manages to capture data in near real-time and with a near perfect level of accuracy, you could get a much snappier experience. And that could lead to more customers for Mindee’s clients.

French startup Mirakl has closed a new Series E funding round of $555 million. Following this round, the company is now valued at $3.5 billion. Mirakl helps you launch a marketplace on your online store for your end customers or for your B2B clients. It’s a software-as-a-service marketplace, meaning that Mirakl manages the marketplace for you.

Silver Lake is leading the investment with existing investors 83North, Elaia Partners, Felix Capital and Permira also participating. With today’s funding round, Mirakl is experiencing a sharp valuation bump as the company closed a $300 million funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation last year.

Some of Mirakl’s clients include ABB, Accor, Airbus Helicopters, Carrefour, Express, Leroy Merlin, The Kroger Co and Toyota Material Handling.

Chances are you’re already familiar with marketplaces on online stores. If the e-commerce brand doesn’t have the item you’re looking for, they might be recommending some third-party sellers. You can buy the item from this third-party seller directly on the store you’re using. Mirakl helps you add a marketplace to your site.

On some online stores, marketplace transactions have overtaken in-house transactions. It’s a lucrative shift as e-commerce companies don’t own the inventory of third-party sellers. It frees up some capital to increase reach and online sales.

And that trend isn’t limited to consumer-facing online stores. B2B marketplaces are emerging. For instance, car manufacturers rely on many different suppliers. They could all list parts directly on a marketplace so that repair shops can easily find the right part to fix a car.

When you add a marketplace component, you switch from a one-to-many model to a many-to-many model. It means that you have to make sure that you’re taking advantage of your marketplace by partnering with the right third-party sellers. As a third-party seller, it also means that you need to list your products on as many marketplaces as possible.

That’s why the company has also built something called Mirakl Connect. The startup positions itself as a center piece of the marketplace ecosystem by connecting online stores with sellers. Mirakl customers can use Mirakl Connect to find third-party sellers. And third-party sellers can more easily list their products on Mirakl-compatible marketplaces.

With today’s funding round, Mirakl plans to increase the size of its engineering team. It’ll add 350 engineers on top of its team of 500. Similarly, the customer success team will double in size. In other words, things are going well for Mirakl, so let’s invest.

Image Credits: Mirakl

French startup Alan is better known for its health insurance products — they now insure 200,000 people. But it has been slowly building a superapp for your health and expanding with new services. Today, the company announced its first acquisition ever with the acquisition of Jour for $20 million. This is going to be the foundation for a new service called Alan Mind.

“More than 13 million people in France are facing a mental health issue. If you look at people under 35, it’s 3 out of 4 people — so it’s basically everybody,” co-founder an CEO Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve said in a press conference earlier today.

And if you look at the past 18 months, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a tremendous impact on mental health. Depressive moods and anxiety issues have basically doubled. 66% of people are dealing with sleep disorders.

“The question we asked ourselves is: How did we get there?” Samuelian-Werve said. “We see two important topics. First, there has been a chronic lack of prevention that is quite obvious. Mental health has been neglected by public health policies.”

“The second pillar that led us where we are is poor care. There are disparities between regions that are very high. In Paris, it can take up to 8 months in some hospitals if you want to see a therapist. In the Rhône-Alpes area, it takes 67 days on average to book an appointment,” he added.

And even if you can find the right person, you’ll often end up spending a lot of money. France’s national healthcare system doesn’t cover mental health that well.

With Alan Mind, the startup wants to work on these two areas of improvement. It’s a B2B service, so the company is selling access to Alan Mind to its B2B clients, who can then recommend Alan Mind to their employees.

“Do companies have a role to play in mental health? We believe that they do. Companies are responsible for protecting their employees’ health,” Samuelian-Werve said. In particular, they reached that conclusion when they realized that lockdowns have affected work-life balance. It’s hard to say when your work day ends and your personal time starts.

Image Credits: Alan

By acquiring Jour, Alan is betting on cognitive behavioral therapy. Employees can install an app and start answering questions to evaluate their current state of mind. They can find content in the app, put words on their feelings and work on themselves. There are videos, a dashboard feature, breathing exercises, etc.

If employees feel like that’s not enough, they can start an individual therapy with a health professional. Alan Mind lets you book a telehealth appointment. The company has hired a handful of psychologists so that you can get an appointment in just a few days.

Of course, companies never know that someone in the team has used Alan Mind. But HR teams receive an anonymized report every month. It’s not about spying on employees, but more about identifying common issues and providing ideas for prevention workshops.

Alan Mind is just getting started as the company only has five clients for this service — BioSerenity, Brut, Joone, Opal and Talk. Companies pay €5 per month per employee if they’re already Alan customers, or a bit more if they just want Alan Mind.

As for Jour, the B2C app will remain available in the App Store. The startup has attracted 2 million downloads before its acquisition. It has a slightly different positioning and it’s going to be useful to identify areas of improvement for Alan Mind.

Screenshots of Jour. Image Credits: Alan

French startup Skello has raised a $47.3 million funding round (€40 million). The company has been working on a software-as-a-service tool that lets you manage the work schedule of your company. What makes it special is that Skello automatically takes into account local labor laws and collective agreements.

Partech is leading today’s funding round. Existing investors XAnge and Aglaé Ventures are also participating. The startup had previously raised a €300,000 seed round and a €6 million Series A round in 2018.

Skello works with companies across many industries, such as retail, hospitality, pharmacies, bakeries, gyms, escape games and more. And many of them were simply using Microsoft Excel to manage their schedule.

By using Skello, you get an online service that works for both managers and employees. On the manager side, you can view who is working and when. You can assign employees to fill some gaps.

For employees, they can also connect to the platform to see their own schedule. Employees can also say when they are unavailable and request time off. And when something unexpected comes up, employees can trade shifts.

“We really want to put employees at the center of the product,” co-founder and CEO Quitterie Mathelin-Moreaux told me. “They have a mobile app and the idea is to make the work schedule as collaborative as possible in order to allocate resources as efficiently as possible and increase team retention.”

At every step of the scheduling process, Skello manages legal requirements. For instance, Skello remembers mandatory weekly rest periods. The platform knows that your employees can’t work across a long time range. And Skello can count overtime hours, holiday hours, Sunday shifts, etc.

When you’re approaching the end of the month, Skello can generate a report with everyone’s timesheet. You can integrate Skello directly with your payroll tool to make this process a bit less tedious as well.

Skello is currently used across 7,000 points of sale. Now, the company wants to expand to more European countries and increase the size of the team from 150 employees to 300 employees by 2022.

Algolia has raised a $150 million Series D funding round at a post-money valuation of $2.25 billion. Compared to the Series C round from October 2019, the company’s valuation has more than quadrupled. It means that Algolia is now a unicorn with a valuation above $1 billion.

The company is best known for its search-as-a-service product. It lets you integrate real-time search in your app or website using a developer-friendly API. Using an Algolia-powered search feature feels like using Spotlight on a Mac. Results load with each keystroke and appear in just a few milliseconds.

The company now has over 10,000 customers, including some big names, such as Slack, Stripe, Medium, Zendesk and Lacoste. Right now, the company handles over 1.5 trillion search queries per year — that’s a 1,500,000,000,000 if you want to see all the zeros.

Lone Pine Capital is leading today’s funding round. Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, STEADFAST Capital Ventures, Glynn Capital and Twilio also participated in the round. But that’s not all, some existing investors also put more money on the table, such as Accel, Salesforce Ventures, DAG, Owl Rock and World Innovation Lab.

While the company doesn’t share revenue numbers directly, Algolia says that its annual recurring revenue has increased by 180% year over year.

“The future is API-first – a reality underscored by the growth seen by Twilio, Stripe, Algolia and others in the API economy. A huge part of our success has, and will continue to be, our relentless focus on developers with our PLG strategy — enabling them to build search into their websites and apps, so they create the most relevant and dynamic digital experiences.” Algolia CEO Bernadette Nixon said in a statement. “And we’re excited to continue to solve customers' problems as we continue to expand beyond search with Algolia Recommend and Predict.”

In addition to its search API, Algolia has expanded to other real-time APIs. For instance, you can provide real-time product recommendations on your e-commerce website with Algolia Recommend. This is part of a strategy to diversify the company’s product offering.

In particular, the company is now trying to analyze the visitor’s intent to predict whether they’re likely to purchase something on not. Companies can then leverage that info to refresh content dynamically, send a push notification, display a special offer, etc.

Originally founded in France, the company has grown tremendously over the past few years. Algolia is now a big enterprise-focused company with a solid business. Last year, its co-founder and CEO Nicolas Dessaigne decided to transition to a non-operational role.

And the company has recruited quite a few senior executives over the past 18 months — Michelle Adams (chief revenue officer, formerly of Dropbox), Carlton Baab (chief financial officer, formerly of Alfresco), Piyush Patel (chief business development officer, formerly of Capgemini), Jim Schattin (chief customer officer, formerly of Alteryx), Jason McClelland (chief marketing officer, formerly of Salesforce and Adobe) and Bharat Guruprakash (chief product officer, formerly of Twilio).

As you can see, it’s a long list of talented people, which means that Algolia is focused on building a long-term company instead of building cool technology and optimizing for an acquisition. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn about an IPO down the road.

French startup Spendesk has announced earlier today that it has raised a $118 million funding round (€100 million) led by General Atlantic. Overall, the company has raised $189 million (€160 million) since its inception.

Existing investors Index Ventures and Eight Road Ventures participated once again in today’s funding round.

Spendesk, as the name suggests, focuses on all things related to spend management. Originally founded in startup studio eFounders, the startup first offered virtual and physical company cards for employees. While corporate cards are quite popular in the U.S., many small and medium companies in France can’t give a card to every single employee.

That’s why spending your company’s money can be a cumbersome process. You can borrow your boss’s card but they’ll have to trust you with it. You can pay with your own personal card but you want to be reimbursed as quickly as possible.

By combining a SaaS platform with corporate cards, it opens up a ton of possibilities. For instance, you can create an approval workflow for expensive purchases. You can set different budgets for different teams.

Over time, Spendesk has expanded beyond cards to manage expenses and invoice processing. It tries to automate some repetitive accounting tasks as well. Employees are automatically reminded that they have to attach a receipt for each transaction. You can export everything to Xero, Datev, Sage, Cegid or Netsuite.

If that pitch sounds familiar, it’s because there are a handful of European startups that are all doing well in this field. Soldo recently raised $180 million while Pleo snatched $150 million at a $1.7 billion valuation.

And yet, Spendesk doubled its revenue over the past year. Its team grew from 150 to 300 employees and it plans to double its headcount again over the next couple of years.

It means two things — the market opportunity is important and many customers are switching from old school workflows to modern SaaS products. That’s why three startups can grow at the same time.

“Traditionally, finance teams haven’t been equipped with the tools that can support this transformation,” Spendesk co-founder and CEO Rodolphe Ardant said in a statement. “In the past few years we have built the reference spend management solution for finance teams in Europe, which frees businesses and their people from administrative constraints of spending and managing money at work. While our solution is about empowering finance teams, we are actually delivering value to the entire business through the finance team.”

Spendesk currently has 3,000 clients, including Algolia, Soundcloud, Curve, Doctolib, Gousto, Raisin, Sezane and Wefox.

Image Credits: Spendesk

French startup Younited Credit has raised a $170 million funding round. Goldman Sachs is leading the round with existing investors Eurazeo, Bpifrance and AG2R La Mondiale also participating. The company offers several credit products to European consumers. It also has a diversified distribution strategy.

Consumer credit in Europe is completely different from consumer credit in the U.S. Many countries don’t rely on a central credit score system to assess your credit worthiness. Similarly, most people don’t have a credit card. Financial institutions that want to offer credit lines have to evaluate the potential risk behind a credit application. It can be a complicated and tedious process.

Younited Credit differentiates itself from legacy players with a data-driven, AI-based approach. Instead of sending a ton of documents to your banker, Younited Credit tries to automate request processes as much as possible.

The company takes advantage of DSP2 regulation and open banking APIs to ingest data. As the startup has facilitated a huge volume of credit offering, it can also leverage past data for machine learning risk models.

So far, Younited Credit has granted more than €2.4 billion in credit ($2.8 billion at today’s exchange rate). It operates in five European countries. France is still the company’s leading market as Italy, Spain, Portugal and Germany represent 40% of Younited Credit’s revenue.

More recently, the company started embedding its product into third-party products. For instance, banks and fintech companies offer credit products in their apps thanks to partnerships with Younited Credit. Examples include N26, Lydia, Orange Bank and Fortuneo. In 2021, the B2B offering represented 30% of Younited Credit’s net banking income.

Right now, Younited Credit has 440 employees. It plans to hire another 200 people over the next 18 months. The company wants to double down on European markets.

Up next, Younited Credit wants to double down on embedded finance with credit products that appear on the checkout page of popular e-commerce websites and apps. The company will compete with ‘buy now, pay later’ companies, such as Klarna, Floa, Oney, Scalapay, etc.

Named Younited Pay, the company plans to offer a wide range of options with payment terms spread over 3 to 48 months. Some companies are already using Younited Pay, such as Free, Micromania and LDLC.

The startup is offering this payment solution online and in brick-and-mortar stores. Once again, Younited Credit tries to find customers where they are already. And it seems like a smart move as physical points of sales represent over 50% of Younited Pay payments this year.

French startup ManoMano has raised a Series F funding round of $355 million led by Dragoneer Investment Group. The company operates an e-commerce platform focused on DIY, home improvement and gardening products. It is currently available in six European countries. Following today’s funding round, the company has reached a valuation of $2.6 billion.

In addition to Dragoneer Investment Group, Temasek, General Atlantic, Eurazeo, Bpifrance’s Large Venture fund, Aglaé Ventures, Kismet Holdings and Armat Group are also participating.

“We operate in Europe and we are the industry leader in online sales,” co-founder and co-CEO Philippe de Chanville told me. In France in particular, the company has been profitable for a couple of years already. In 2020 alone, the company’s gross merchandise volume doubled to €1.2 billion ($1.42 billion at today’s rate).

So why did the company raise given that it’s already in a strong position to replicate the same model in other European markets? Because they could and because they didn’t need to. With a high valuation, ManoMano could raise quite a bit of money without having to sell a significant chunk of its equity.

In addition to France, the startup operates in Spain, Italy, Belgium, Germany and the U.K. With today’s funding round, the company wants to develop its activities in the U.K. and Germany in particular — they are Europe’s two biggest markets for home improvement and gardening.

ManoMano sells products to hobbyists and also targets the B2B market with ManoManoPro. It’s already working well in France with very small teams (1 to 5 employees) and the company is expanding this offering to Spain and Italy.

The startup will also invest more heavily in its product and build a better logistics infrastructure. “For the logistics part, we work with third-party logistics companies — we are a tech company,” co-founder and co-CEO Christian Raisson told me.

ManoMano doesn’t have its own warehouses and doesn’t own any inventory. That’s why ManoMano plans to recruit 1,000 people over the next 18 months and most of them will be tech profiles.

While ManoMano has 7 million clients, sales of home improvement and gardening items still mostly happen in brick-and-mortar stores. The startup is well aware that it’s not just a matter of having the best products at good price points.

ManoMano works with advisors (or Manodvisors) so that experts can give advice whenever customers need some tips. Overall, customers have initiated 2.3 million conversations with advisors in 2020. Recommendations and advice will be key to gain market shares. And the company is now well capitalized to innovate on this front and differentiate itself from other e-commerce platforms.

Aircall has raised a $120 million Series D round led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management. Following today’s funding round, the company has reached unicorn status, which means it has a valuation above $1 billion — this is the 16th French unicorn.

The startup has been building a cloud-based phone system for call centers, support lines and sales teams. It integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, Slack, Intercom and other popular CRM, support and communication systems.

Aircall customers can create local numbers and set up an interactive voice response directory. The service manages the call queue for you and your agents can start answering inbound calls. Agents can transfer calls and put customers on hold. Admins can see analytics, monitor calls and see how everyone is doing.

In addition to Goldman Sachs Asset Management, existing investors DTCP, eFounders, Draper Esprit, Adam Street Partners, NextWorldCap and Gaia are also participating once again in today’s funding round.

As a cloud-based software product, Aircall works well with remote or hybrid teams. For the past year, many companies have been looking for a new phone system with various lockdowns taking place around the world. And Aircall has capitalized on this influx of customers.

When it comes to metrics, it means that signups increased by 65% in 2020. New customers include Caudalie, OpenClassrooms and Too Good To Go. Overall, Aircall has 8,500 customers. 15% of them are based in France, 35% in the U.S. and 50% in other countries.

With the new funding round, the company plans to iterate on its product with new integrations with third-party tools, and in particular industry-specific integrations. There will be new offices in London and Berlin as well as new hires in the company’s existing offices based in New York, Paris, Sydney and Madrid.

The company also plans to control a bigger chunk of its tech stack. It means that it’ll collaborate with big telecommunications companies to leverage their networks. You can also expect more product features with better transcription and better sentiment analysis.

Meet Mediflash, a new French startup that wants to improve temp staffing in healthcare facilities, such as nursing homes, clinics and mental health facilities. The company positions itself as an alternative to traditional temp staffing agencies. They claim to offer better terms for both caregivers and institutions.

“It costs a small fortune to health facilities while caregivers are paid poorly,” co-founder Léopold Treppoz told me.

Traditional temp staffing agencies hire caregivers and nurses on their payroll. When a facility doesn’t have enough staff, they ask their usual temp staffing agency. The agency finds someone and charges the facility.

“When we started, we thought we would do a temp staffing agency, but more digital, more tech,” Treppoz said. But the startup realized they would face the same issues as regular temp staffing agencies.

Instead, they looked at other startups working on freelancer marketplaces for developers, project managers, marketing experts and more. In France, a few of them have been quite successful, such as Comet, Malt, StaffMe and Brigad — some of them even run a vertical focused on health professionals. But Mediflash wants to focus specifically on caregivers.

Professionals signing up to Mediflash are freelancers. Mediflash only acts as a marketplace that connects health facilities with caregivers. The company says caregivers can expect more revenue — up to 20% — while facilities end up paying less.

Of course, it’s not a fair comparison as temp staffing agencies hire caregivers. As a freelancer, you don’t have the same benefits as a full-time employee. And in particular, you can’t get unemployment benefits.

“But a lot of caregivers say that this isn’t an issue because there is a lot of demand [from health facilities],” Treppoz said. On the platform, you’ll find students in nursing school who want to earn a bit of money, professionals who already have a part-time job looking for additional work as well as full-time substitute caregivers.

Usually, facilities just want someone for three days because they’re running short on staff. Mediflash is well aware that health facilities usually work with one temp staffing agency and that’s it. That’s why the startup has a sales team that has to talk with each facility one by one. Right now, the startup is mostly focused on Metz, Nancy and Strasbourg.

Mediflash recently raised a $2 million funding round (€1.7 million) led by Firstminute Capital. Several business angels are also participating, such as Alexandre Fretti (Malt), Alexandre Lebrun (Nabla), Simon Dawlat (Batch.com) and Marie

Outtier (Aiden.ai, acquired by Twitter).

So far, the company has managed 1,400 substitute days. Mediflash takes a cut on each transaction. The company now plans to expand to other cities all around the country.