Loic Soubeyrand had already co-founded Teads, the video advertising company, when he went looking at something far more mundane: lunch. His new venture started in 2016 as Lunchr, an app to pre-order your meal and skip the queue.
The first idea was small. What changed it was an observation about the bits of paper in people's pockets. Most meal vouchers in France were still paper, and the millions of salaried workers who use them were stuck with a clumsy system. Lunchr turned itself into a meal voucher business and launched a card on the Mastercard network. In March 2020 it was renamed Swile to signal that it was no longer only about lunch but about all the benefits a company gives its staff.
That was a hard public moment for a company growing fast with a young workforce.
The early money was modest. About 2.5 million euros came from Daphni in January 2017, then 11 million from Idinvest in 2018, and 30 million in February 2019 with Index Ventures and Kima Ventures, by which time it said it had 2,000 clients. In 2020 it raised 70 million, and in October 2021 a 200 million dollar round valued it above a billion, making it a French unicorn. Bold moves followed: a deal in 2021 to equip about 62,000 Carrefour employees, and acquisitions of Sweevana, Briq, a Brazilian benefits company and Okarito.
The cost of speed was real. In 2021, Le Monde published testimonies from employees at several startups, Swile among them, describing toxic management, relayed by the Instagram account Balance ta start-up. That was a hard public moment for a company growing fast with a young workforce. And the accounts show the burn: in 2021 Swile lost about 41 million euros on revenue near 11 million.
Then the arithmetic turned. Revenue reached 56.6 million euros in 2023, and about 171 million in 2024. The company says it became profitable in the last quarter of 2023, though reports differ on how the net result for 2024 should be read. It is based in Montpellier, and sponsors the ASVEL Lyon-Villeurbanne basketball club and Montpellier's football team.
Little of Soubeyrand's early life is public. What the record does show is a founder who, after one success, chose a boring problem and paid attention to what people actually carried in their wallets. A second company can start from something as plain as a lunch voucher, as long as you are willing to rename it when it outgrows the name.