Rodolphe Ardant has said that the most difficult stretch of his career as a chief executive was the spring of 2020, when offices emptied and every company's spending changed overnight. In an interview that October, he said he was prouder of how the team held together then than of closing the Series B.
He was not new to hard stretches. Before Spendesk he founded Wozaik, a digital advertising start-up that Solocal bought in 2013, then served as operating chief at the car-sharing company Drivy. After that he was a founder-in-residence at eFounders, the Paris start-up studio. That is where Spendesk began, in 2016, with Guilhem Bellion and Jordane Giuly. The company was registered on 1 August.
The problem they picked was the dull one in every office. Employees paid out of pocket and waited for repayment, while finance staff chased receipts. Ardant wanted B2C payments-style simplicity for businesses, with virtual and physical cards, expense claims and invoices in one tool. He described the aim as building trust and autonomy inside companies.
What many people do not know is that one of the three left. Giuly stepped away after about twelve months of conversations with investors around the Series B, reportedly because he did not see himself building the fast-scaling company Spendesk was becoming. It is a candid reminder that founders are not always the same people at 20 employees as at 200.
The company did scale. It went from about 20 to 120 people in 2018 and 2019, passed 40,000 users by October 2020, and in January 2022 raised 100 million euros to become France's 26th unicorn. The cost showed: a net loss of about 18 million euros in 2020 on 8 million of revenue, and in September 2024 roughly 150 jobs were cut after heavy losses.
The repair has been slow. In March 2025 Spendesk recorded its first profitable month, with annual recurring revenue of 52 million euros.
For a founder the useful idea is Ardant's own: pride came from the team's resilience in the worst months, not from the funding headline. A cap table gets you to the starting line; people get you through the winter.