Hyperline secures $10 million for its automated billing platform

French startup Hyperline Want to build the next generation charge b. Over the past two years, the startup has developed a new billing platform that can be used for recurring subscriptions, one-time purchases, usage-based billing and more.

Hyperline has raised an initial €4 million in funding from Index Ventures 2023 ($4.1 million at today’s exchange rate). And Index Ventures is doubling this investment as it invests another $10 million in the startup.

While billing seems like a straightforward problem, it becomes a tedious problem once you start scaling. “With billing, what’s time-consuming is really the day-to-day operations. Every day, when you have more than 200 or 300 customers, someone has to go and check that everything is OK,” founder and CEO Lucas Bedout told TechCrunch.

Sometimes, the price isn’t right. Other times, you forgot to add some items to the invoice or the client is asking for a partial refund. And, of course, automatic payments fail fairly regularly for one reason or another.

“In the beginning, we told ourselves, we’ll look at current tools like ChargeB, and we’ll do something better than them. 20% is good except for good, but everything has changed so much that now it is different. Now, people are looking for automation, they don’t want to manually process invoices, send reminders, generate quotes.” says Bedout.

In addition to subscription management, Hyperline has added other pricing models. For example, clients can set custom pricing on the fly or add some usage-based elements so customers pay for what they use. Hyperline handles direct shipments.

And when it’s time to pay, Hyperline doesn’t directly process the payment but takes care of that part for you. “We manage the entire value chain without payment … However, we do something that is very nice in terms of payment. We position ourselves as an orchestrator. Our customers do not use direct payment processors,” said Bedout.

Instead of juggling between different tabs to interact with Stripe, GoCardless, AirWallex or other payment processors, Hyperline acts as an interface with these payment providers. This makes it easy to use multiple payment providers depending on the country or payment method.

Customers usually start with the web interface. They connect Hyperline to their CRM so sales teams can generate quotes directly from the CRM. They connect the platform with accounting software to process invoices and reconcile payments.

But Hyperline also offers an API, which can be particularly useful for syncing events directly from the data warehouse for usage-based billing.

14 people currently work for Hyperline, but the company expects to grow to 25 employees in the near future. Clients include Loki, Malo, Scoreplay, Gladia and Formance.

“Most of our customers today generate revenues between €3 and €10 million,” said Bedout. But Hyperline already thinks it can work with large companies that handle large volumes of shipments. This requires working with an integration company. And that’s something Hyperline is already testing.