Ask a small-business owner how much cash they will have in three months and many will open a spreadsheet. It is usually out of date, and somebody built it at night. Agicap was founded in Lyon in 2016 to replace that spreadsheet.
The founders were Sébastien Beyet, Clément Mauguet and Lucas Bertola. Beyet had been a senior strategy consultant at Ares & Company. Mauguet came from finance and consulting and graduated from EM Lyon in 2013. They were not building a consumer app. They were building a tool for the finance director who must know on Monday if payroll is safe on Friday.
For a Lyon software company, that was an unusual cheque from an unusual investor.
The early years were modest and slow. The product linked bank accounts and accounting data into a single view of cash coming in and going out, and a forecast on top. It was sold as a subscription to SMEs in France first. In 2019 the company took in 2.4 million euros from BlackFin Capital and Kima Ventures. The following year Partech put in fifteen million. That is a small amount for a software company with ambitions, but it was enough to build the product and open in Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands.
The turn came in 2021. Greenoaks Capital, a California fund, invested 82 million euros, about 100 million dollars. For a Lyon software company, that was an unusual cheque from an unusual investor. The money bought speed. In 2022 Agicap reported 100 percent growth and announced plans to hire 600 people, 300 of them in Lyon. It was selected for the French Tech 120 programme in 2022 and again in 2023, and an investment bank listed it among 50 companies that could become unicorns within two years.
The price of that speed arrived later. In November 2024 Agicap raised a Series C of about 45 million euros, with AXA Venture Partners and Accel among the investors, to push into mid-sized companies across Europe. It was a smaller cheque than the 2021 round and came with a sharper focus.
The company has not published revenue. What it has published is a direction: from small firms and their spreadsheets to larger finance teams that need cash visibility across borders.
The lesson for a founder is that a boring, urgent question can carry a company a long way. Agicap did not claim to reinvent finance. It answered one number, how much cash will we have, and kept moving up the ladder of customers who needed the answer.