Fygr, the French startup which allows startups, VSEs and SMEs to automate their cash management, recently completed a fundraising of 2 million euros. We spoke with François Menjaud, co-founder of Fygr. The latter revealed to us the upcoming projects of his startup.
Everything you need to know about Fygr
Who are you ?
My name is François Menjaud and I am one of the two founders of Fygr. I come from a business background (HEC 2017), with a master’s degree in corporate finance. I was already attracted to entrepreneurship at the time, but I still chose to start my professional career in investment banking, for almost 3 years. I worked in particular on M&A subjects, as well as on financing subjects. I was passionate about this profession, both technical in certain aspects (financial modeling in particular), and quite multidisciplinary elsewhere, since it involves financial analysis, strategy, legal… and also a lot of human and relational!
After a few years in this profession that I loved, I nevertheless began to think more and more about launching my entrepreneurial project. As I said, it’s something that had always attracted me and I was starting to lose it! So I started talking about it to those around me and we quickly decided to get started with Geoffrey, one of my best childhood friends. The cooperation was perfect: we got along more than well, our profiles were very complementary (Geoffrey is an engineer graduated from ENSAE, specializing in finance, data, and Tech) and we wanted to work on the same subjects (finance, Tech). So we got to work quickly, we left our permanent contracts to be able to put 100% of our energy into the project and Fygr arrived at the beginning of 2020. Outside of my professional life, I am a big sports fan, and I I try to continue practicing as often as possible, despite a fairly busy schedule.
What does Fygr do?
Fygr is a financial management solution for managers of VSEs and SMEs, and for their accountants. By talking with hundreds of VSE-SME managers, we quickly realized that almost 100% of them had already experienced, or regularly experience, stressful situations linked to their financial situation and in particular their cash management. In these cases, they ask themselves questions like:
- Can I hire? Or even sometimes: will I be able to pay my employees at the end of the month?
- How much have I spent on marketing over the last 3 months?
- How would I fare if my turnover decreased by 50% over the next 3 months?
- Etc.
Unfortunately, despite the ultra-strategic aspect of financial management, the vast majority of managers do not use the right tools to see things more clearly. Either they use a manual spreadsheet or they consult their banking interface from time to time. This is far from sufficient: these tools generate a lot of work for the entrepreneur and above all a significant mental load. All this can lead them to make risky choices for the development of their activity. With Geoffrey, we both came from the financial world, so we had worked for dozens of companies on financial modeling and reporting topics. We thought that it was not normal that companies with 5 to 100 people could not have their own financial management tools.
We therefore created Fygr, with the ambition of making financial management accessible to any business manager. Fygr’s mission is to give business leaders a 360° vision: where are they today, and how did they get there? And how can they easily plan for the coming months, in order to anticipate and make the best decisions for their business? Two and a half years after launching the first version of Fygr, we have already helped more than a thousand VSE-SME managers, including MWM, Selency, E-Kipeo, Scalingo… and around a hundred consulting firms. an accountant.
Fygr’s fundraising
Why did you raise 2 million euros?
After almost 3 years of development, we have already reached great milestones with Fygr. But we want to go much further! If we raised 2 million euros, it is to continue to place Fygr among the best financial management solutions on the market in France and Europe, in order to always better support the managers of VSE-SMEs in their daily financial management. .
We are currently launching several major partnerships with other FinTech players, to enable them to provide analytics and financial management functionalities to their users, thanks to the Fygr API. The goal: to make Fygr known and used by as many managers as possible, by creating unique and consistent end-to-end user experiences between the different tools used by VSEs and SMEs.
Why did you choose to bring these investors into your capital?
Fygr has chosen to bring Havenrock as well as business angels into its capital. We were not sure whether we wanted to bring in an investment fund from this financing round, because the project was still young and we were very favorable to the idea of surrounding ourselves with business angels who would bring us their experience and their skill. We therefore began to set up a 100% financing round with business angels, selecting only profiles likely to be able to advise us on certain subjects of Fygr’s development.
After a few discussions, we had the opportunity (thanks to Sylvain Forté – thanks to him!) to meet and share our vision with Emna and Omar, partners and leaders of Havenrock. We immediately felt that we shared the same vision and the same ambition for Fygr. The rest of the discussion therefore moved very quickly and a few days later the financing round was completed.
What will Fygr look like in 5 years?
Difficult question as Fygr operates in an environment (FinTech B2B) which is evolving very quickly in general. On the Fygr side, we have an assumed positioning of pure playerspecialized in financial management issues, with a strong focus on forecasting. Hence our strategy to disseminate the product as much as possible through relevant integrations with the best partners in our ecosystem.
Within 5 years, thanks to this strategy, we not only want to be a reference solution for entrepreneurs in terms of financial management, we want to be an essential solution. Furthermore, Fygr currently only operates in France, where there is already a lot to do! In 5 years, Fygr will most likely have been exported to other countries, because financial management is a universal concept and all managers need tools to make their lives easier on these subjects.
