Splitting a bill is the least glamorous moment in anyone's evening. The group sits around a table, someone reaches for a calculator, someone else says they will pay back tomorrow, and nobody remembers. Lydia began in that awkward minute.
Cyril Chiche, the company's chief executive, and Antoine Porte, its technical chief, built an app that let one person send money to another with only a phone number. The app launched in 2013, and the story that follows is told through the product and the choices they made.
It added a payment card, accounts, savings and subscriptions, and became what its makers called a financial super app.
The product's first years were quiet. Peer-to-peer transfers in France were slow and clumsy, run through bank websites that had not changed in a decade. Lydia worked on friction. It was easy to use, fast, and free for the sender, which suited students and young workers who owed small sums to friends.
The turn came when Lydia stopped being only a way to repay a friend. It added a payment card, accounts, savings and subscriptions, and became what its makers called a financial super app. In January 2020 Chinese group Tencent led a €40 million Series B, a surprising backer for a French payments start-up. Then in December 2021, at the height of the fintech boom, an Accel-led $100 million round valued the company above $1 billion and made it one of France's unicorns.
That valuation made life harder rather than easier. Revolut and N26 sold similar products across Europe, banks added instant payments, and fintech investors grew cautious after 2021. Lydia's answer was to widen its offer. A card called Sumeria and paid subscription plans aimed to turn millions of casual users into paying ones. One revenue estimate puts the company at about $87 million for 2024, though that figure comes from a tracking site rather than the company.
The story is unfinished. What is clear is the method. Chiche and Porte picked a tiny, universal irritation, solved it better than the banks, and only later grew into the larger business that made investors take notice. A founder who wants a large market can begin with the smallest daily annoyance and earn trust one transfer at a time.