Upflow was born beginning of 2018. First, we thought of financing B2B companies. After talking to hundreds of finance teams, we ended up finding out that most simply needed to get paid on time. That’s how Upflow came to life.
Alex and Barnaby met through eFounders. It is the startup studio behind renowned unicorns like Front, Aircall, and Spendesk. Both are engineers yet very different. They complement each other. Alex overlooks the business side as CEO whereas Barnaby leads Product & Engineering as CTPO. They recruited a small team of dedicated talented people to build the product and take it to market. Many are still on board and have grown since.
Products sometimes change radically over time. So did Upflow. We started with a one-size-fits-all product, which worked fine but not great. Instead, we decided to refocus our product and go to market on a narrower tech segment. And we applied to Y Combinator to enter the US late 2019.
Y Combinator is one of the world’s most famous startup accelerators. We were challenged on our product, and distribution strategy for three months, and met inspiring founders and teams from all over the world. Covid hit in the middle of the batch, at a time when we expected to take off. Instead, we trimmed down the product and part of our customer base to refocus and improve our efficiency.
Upflow integrates with billing and invoicing market leaders. Only with Quickbooks could millions of B2B companies connect to Upflow in instants. We have not made it this far, but we are set to build something impactful.
Refocusing was a key move. But it paid off. Numbers started to go up again in a meaningful way. We could expand beyond EMEA. As a result of our strong track record and key logos closed, we raised our Series A. $15m from great fintech investors to take Upflow to the next level. From then on, we went from a Paris-based 13 people startup to recruiting a team in New York and growing the existing one in Europe.