Fintech Friday: Libeo

Libeo’s CEO, Pierre Dutaret, spoke with Efma’s Boris Plantier about how his time in the restaurant business led to the creation of a payments startup helping SME businesses around the world.

What led to the creation of Libeo?

After 5 years in M&A in London and Madrid, I left the finance world in 2012 to launch Farago (renamed Panorama), a leading group of restaurants. It is from this experience that was born Libeo. Very early on I realized there was a lack of efficient tools to help small and medium businesses manage their company's finances on a daily basis. With Jeremy Attuil and Pierre-Antoine Glandier, we created Libeo, which is now the first procure-to pay platform for SMEs. With Libeo, we help companies to easily manage and pay account payables, save time and keep track of their cash flow.

Could you present Libeo's offer?

Today, more than 60% of SMEs still use Excel to manage their invoices. This represents hours of manual entry with very little added value. We believe that businesses ought to be focusing on developing their business and not wasting time on manual tasks that can easily be automated.

This is what Libeo allows: auto-entry of invoice data, simple approval workflows for you and your team, one-click payments, and real-time reconciliation with your existing accounting system. All on a single platform for huge time savings and gains in productivity.

What's coming next for Libeo?

We're very excited to have recently announced a 2 million Euros investment led by Breega and with the support of BPIfrance and business angels. This first investment will allow us to accelerate our growth by focusing on 3 main axes: recruiting new talent to strengthen our current team of 15, developing new features to go deeper in financial forecasting and, finally, accelerate operations and marketing to keep on acquiring new users!