Unicorn Story
With Arthur Waller, co-founder & CEO of Pennylane.
Arthur Waller grew up in the western suburbs of Paris, in Maisons-Laffitte. Just twenty minutes from the capital, the pace of this small town on the edge of the Saint-Germain-en-Laye forest is nothing like that of the city. Back then, if you were looking for Arthur, all you had to do was head to the football pitch. He was passionate about the game and his dream was to one day become a professional footballer. The town’s proximity to the Camp des Loges, the Paris Saint-Germain training center, kept that ambition alive. A defensive midfielder or centre-back, he spent, like any young football fan, his Saturday afternoons and Sunday mornings on the field with his friends at Maisons-Laffitte FC, then at Houilles AC, clubs that were playing at the highest levels of the regional leagues. All of that came to an end when, at 18, he decided to move to the capital to continue his studies.
Arthur pursued two prestigious programmes: Sciences Po and École Polytechnique. Since his teenage years, he had been interested in geopolitics and economics. So naturally, he specialised in economics and, with such a strong academic background, landed two internships any student in that field would dream of. First, he flew to Gabon to work for the International Monetary Fund. Then, he went to London to join Goldman Sachs. These valuable experiences gave him a deep understanding of the financial world, but above all, helped him realise one thing that would change the course of his career:
This job wasn’t for him.
Arthur had imagined his early professional days filled with passionate debates and meetings where the rules of the game were being rewritten. Instead, he found himself in an open-space, alone behind a computer, compiling data into Excel spreadsheets. After six months, he made a radical decision. He would leave Goldman Sachs and launch a startup with five of his classmates.
“I believe that if you want to scale fast, you need to be very decentralized. And for that, everyone needs to have a clear understanding of the company’s strategy. That’s my job.”
***
In the US, the group of friends discovered dynamic pricing during a sports economics class. The concept is simple: it’s a highly flexible method of setting the price of a product or service based on demand — if, like me, you’re a fan of Oasis, you probably came across this concept a few months ago. Sensing an opportunity, the students decided to bring the idea back to France.
Very quickly, they realized that the French sports industry wasn’t interested in this pricing model. But the hospitality sector might be. In the summer of 2012, the team walked through the doors of the Sciences Po incubator, in the heart of Paris’s 7th arrondissement, to pitch their project PriceMatch. One of the jury members gave them a strong vote of confidence. He owned a hotel and was interested in their solution.
The product quickly found its market. In less than three years, the startup was used by over 700 hotels in 35 countries and had grown to nearly 80 employees. In 2015, just as the company was about to close a Series A round, a unique opportunity came along:
An acquisition offer from Booking.com.
“I often say that founders sell their companies for one of two reasons: fear or fatigue. In our case, it was clearly fear. Booking made it clear that if we didn’t sell, they would copy us. We also realized that our product, while valuable, was aimed at a niche market. In the long run, being acquired was probably our destiny.”
In 2015, Booking.com acquired PriceMatch, and a few months later, the entire team moved to Amsterdam. That earn-out period in the Dutch capital would last three years.
***
Arthur and his friends took several lessons from their first entrepreneurial experience and decided to apply them when they set out on a new adventure in 2019.
The first was that their new project had to be a core tool for their customers, not a peripheral one. In other words, it had to become an Operating System. That way, the startup could embed itself deeply into customer workflows and become even more valuable and harder to replace.
The second was to spend more time on the ideation phase. With PriceMatch, the six friends simply wanted to launch a startup. So they asked themselves, “What can we do better than others?” They built an idea around that and went to hotels to validate it. This time, they would start by talking to their target market and asking, “What’s your most critical problem?”
After identifying the success of QuickBooks in the US and the opportunity in Europe as the accounting industry digitized, much of the original PriceMatch team spent the summer of 2019 speaking with hundreds of accountants. The need became clear.
Pennylane was born in September.
***
Pennylane was co-founded by seven people, four of whom were also co-founders of PriceMatch. We’re far from the typical startup setup with just a CEO and CTO.
Five of the seven co-founders lead a specific division, while the remaining two, including Arthur, hold more cross-functional roles, allowing them to focus on strategy. It may seem like a lot, but Arthur sees it as an advantage. Hiring experienced C-level talent is extremely difficult for a young startup, and this setup allows them to move much faster and avoid the hassle. A bad hire can be very costly.
Pennylane’s early days looked very different from the usual “zero to one” startup story. Arthur and his co-founders built an accounting firm inside Pennylane to test their product directly with accountants. “We wanted to feel the pain of accountants to identify the real problems.” It took a year and a half before the first firm submitted a single case on the platform. Two and a half years before a small firm migrated its full portfolio.
But from that moment, Pennylane’s growth was explosive. Arthur credits this success — and startup success in general — to the alignment of three things: the right timing, the right team, and a deep market. Being an industry expert isn’t essential, coming from outside can offer a fresh perspective. And whatever people say, there’s always a bit of luck involved.
Then, once those ingredients are in place, you need to iterate quickly, and capital helps.
Pennylane’s first two funding rounds, €4 million in 2020 and €15 million in 2021 from Global Founders Capital, Partech, and Kima Ventures, were key to giving the team time to develop the product and hire experienced talent. The founding team was determined to bring on senior profiles early. A startup’s foundations, especially its tech architecture, set the pace for everything that comes later. What matters is having clean architecture so you don’t need to rebuild it later, which could slow down future growth. Early on, to attract top tech talent, the team had a clever idea. Their best salesperson would take on a new mission: recruiting. After all, if he could sell Pennylane to accountants, he could sell it to engineers too.
In 2022, the famed California-based VC Sequoia invested in the French startup. Its first ever investment in France. Back when he was still leading PriceMatch, Arthur had met Luciana Lixandru, then at Accel. In 2020, when she took charge of Sequoia’s new London office and became their first partner in Europe, she outlined several investment theses. The accounting market was one of them, so she called Arthur: “I’ve got my thesis, and I think Pennylane is the company that fits it best.” Beyond the Sequoia name, what mattered to the founders was that this wasn’t opportunistic. It was the meeting of two aligned visions.
In the years that followed, Pennylane kept raising. More than €180 million in total, including a €75 million Series D this year. DST Global, known for investing in Facebook and WhatsApp, and CapitalG, Alphabet’s investment arm, also joined the cap table.
***
For several years, Pennylane and I shared one thing: our workplace. The startup’s offices are in a WeWork right in the heart of Paris’s 9th arrondissement, a lively neighborhood where tech company headquarters sit in the classic Haussmann buildings typical of this part of the city. I remember once running into the CEO of Google on my way to work. He was there to inaugurate a new center dedicated to artificial intelligence.
One thing struck me during those years of sharing space with Pennylane: their welcoming of new hires. Regularly, in the entrance hall, under the large glass dome where the barista stands and between the white columns that divide the space, dozens of new employees would be waiting, ready for their first day on the job. A well-orchestrated onboarding parade.
Every time a new wave joins, thirty people per month at the moment, it is the same ritual for Arthur. He dedicates his entire morning to the newcomers, explaining his vision for Pennylane. “I believe that if you want to scale fast, you need to be very decentralized. And for that, everyone needs to have a clear understanding of the company’s strategy. That’s my job.”
Of course, the larger a company grows, the more likely silos are to form. A team manager handling 100 people will inevitably have internal issues to deal with, sometimes at the expense of communication with other departments. That’s where Arthur steps in. As CEO, he makes sure communication flows smoothly across teams and that there are as few silos or blind spots as possible.
As he puts it, he’s a free electron.
***
In the 2010s, the first wave of fintech — or at least the first time the term really caught on — disrupted the financial industry by breaking apart the different services traditionally offered by banks. This was the era of unbundling, made possible by the rise of smartphones, growing distrust of banks after the 2008 financial crisis, and later, the opening up of the banking system through APIs. It worked remarkably well. As users, we gained access to financial services that were faster, more efficient, and more affordable.
But in recent years, the trend has reversed. Users, including myself, have grown tired of juggling countless tools, both personally and professionally. Fintech companies also realized that offering solutions to very specific problems limited their growth potential. So they began to rebundle financial services to add new revenue streams, smooth out acquisition costs, and increase customer retention.
Pennylane is a perfect example of this shift.
Over time, the fintech has evolved from a simple accounting tool into what could now be described as a financial OS, integrating cash management, customer invoicing, supplier payments, and financial performance tracking into a single platform. The launch of its business bank account in September 2022, in partnership with Swan, marked a turning point in this diversification strategy. This move into banking services fundamentally transforms Pennylane’s business model by complementing its subscription revenue with financial services revenue.
In 2024, Pennylane reached €60 million in annual recurring revenue. The company serves 350,000 businesses and works with 4,500 partner accounting firms. It now employs over 550 people and plans to reach 800 by the end of 2025.
France’s upcoming e-invoicing mandate, which takes effect in September 2026, is a major growth catalyst for Pennylane. Nearly half of the company’s workforce is focused on R&D, and its product strategy is built around three main priorities: developing new e-invoicing features, improving user experience, and integrating with over 300 other business tools.
Pennylane is also setting its sights on Europe, starting with Germany. The ambition isn’t to conquer everything at once, a difficult task given the accounting differences from country to country, but to establish a lasting presence one market at a time.
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Thomas