In a high school in Laval, a small town in north-west France, two classmates built a social network for learning languages. It did not make them rich. It did make Firmin Zocchetto catch what he later called the startup bug, and he never really shook it off.
His family came from Italian immigrants who had been entrepreneurs in construction, so working for yourself was not a foreign idea at home. Leaving university was another matter. After school Zocchetto enrolled at ESCP, one of the grand Paris business schools, and the plan on paper was a normal career. Then, while still a student, he started preparing a company with his old classmate Ghislain de Fontenay and a third partner, Florian Fournier. Balancing lectures with the company became impossible, and he dropped out. In an interview with Leaders League he was candid about the reception: for him the choice was obvious, he said, but for his family, a little less so.
Growth had a price: the company later moved from pure software toward running payroll for clients as a managed service.
What almost nobody outside the founders' circle mentions is how ordinary the target was. Payfit did not chase a glamorous market. It went after payroll, the monthly chore that French companies dread because of the tangle of collective agreements, contribution rates and legal updates. The company was incorporated in September 2015, and the early money was small and fast: about half a million euros in January 2016 from Kima Ventures, TheFamily and Thibaud Elziere, then five million that October with Otium Venture and Xavier Niel. To handle the rules, the team even wrote its own programming language, called JetLang, to express payroll calculations.
Then the cheques got big. Accel put in 14 million euros in 2017, Eurazeo and Bpifrance joined a 70 million round in 2019, and in January 2022 a 254 million euro round valued the company at 1.82 billion euros, France's 23rd unicorn. Growth had a price: the company later moved from pure software toward running payroll for clients as a managed service.
The payoff arrived late. Reporting in July 2026 says Payfit reached profitability roughly ten years after its birth, with about 700 employees and 22,000 client companies in France, Spain and the UK, and recurring revenue near 80 million euros.
Zocchetto is now the one giving advice. These days, he told Leaders League, he is the mentor. The lesson for a young founder is quiet: the unglamorous problem, attacked with a school friend you trust and a family that comes round slowly, can be worth a billion euros.