Every finance team knows the monthly ritual. Someone has paid for a train ticket, a client lunch, a software subscription, and now a shoebox of receipts has to be matched to a spreadsheet. Tristan Leteurtre and Damien Metzger built a company around that small, dull misery.
Mooncard was founded in 2016 in Paris. The pitch was plain: give every employee a company card, let them snap a photo of the receipt on their phone, and have the accounting entry appear on its own. No advances out of pocket. No reimbursement forms. For a ten-person agency or a regional retailer, the saving was hours of tedious admin each month.
A tool built to save a small accountant's evenings was now processing the spending of public bodies and national brands.
The early years were the hard part. A card is a trust product. A finance director has to believe that a young company will not lose track of the money, and that employees will really photograph their receipts. Mooncard spent its first years proving both, one SME at a time. In January 2019 it announced a round of about five million euros to speed up the roll-out, and Leteurtre was by then describing himself as co-founder and CEO of a company with a clear product and thin margins for error.
The reveal, if there is one, is how far a boring tool can travel. SMEs were the first users. Then the buyers got bigger and stranger. The company's own history now lists the French State's purchasing directorate as a client, alongside names like Air France, Indigo, Norauto, Vinci Airports, Loxam and Médecins sans frontières. A tool built to save a small accountant's evenings was now processing the spending of public bodies and national brands.
Money followed in steps. About twenty million euros came in 2021 from existing backers such as Aglaé Ventures and Raise Ventures, as Mooncard pushed into other European countries. In 2023 it raised 37 million euros, bringing in Orange Ventures and the Canadian fund Portage, and used part of the money to add a feature that measures the carbon footprint of card spending.
The company says it now serves about 5,000 client companies, with 200,000 cards in circulation across seven countries and roughly three billion euros of employee spending paid through them. It has not published a revenue figure, and leadership has since passed in the press to Pierre-Yves Roizot as chief executive, while Leteurtre is still presented as the founder.
The lesson for a first-time founder is unglamorous. Mooncard did not invent a new kind of money. It picked one irritation that repeats every month in thousands of offices, and it kept sanding it down until even a government department was willing to sign.