Monite launches a finance management platform that automates the admin and accounting processes for SMEs and announces it has raised €1.1M in pre-seed funding.
Its investors include Tomahawk VC, signals Venture Capital, InVentures and Runa Capital. Ex-Deutsche Bank board Ralph Müller, Postbank Board Member Lars Stoy, ex-Global Head of FX Trading and Sales at Commerzbank Alfred Schorno, former former Managing Partner for McKinsey Central Europe Cornelius Walter, General Partner of Acrobator VC Bas Godska and other top investors focusing on scalable SaaS joined the round as angels.
Small to medium-sized businesses spend on average 15 hours per week or 19% of their time in total doing financial admin tasks. Although it becomes one of their most time-consuming business activities, not all companies even try to streamline these processes with software tools — only 45% of UK companies are using technology to manage their administrative tasks, while others waste billions on admin every year. Monite aims to solve this problem and combines accounting and admin tools in one platform, saving time and significantly reducing costs.
Monite connects to the company’s bank accounts, allowing to invoice clients, manage employee expenses, handle incoming bills and do accounting right within the system. Auto-mapping everything for accounting, the platform can easily prepare a Datev export for tax submission and allows to deal with tax accountant’s questions over a chat. In addition, Monite saves and organizes documents in a tax-compliant way and provides a full finance overview of the company.
“Before launching the platform we’ve studied more than 300 SMEs and freelancers across Europe and found 76,5% of them prefer to use one platform for the admin needs, rather than constantly switching between 5 or 6 narrowly-focused tools,” Ivan Maryasin, CEO of Monite, says. “With Monite we strive to replace all those tools, saving 50% of both time and money and boosting productivity”.
“We are very excited to share our expertise in realizing ambitious growth strategies with Monite,” says Cédric Waldburger, Founder of Tomahawk Ventures. “I've personally experienced the pain points that Monite solves. I know how time-consuming the systems and tools are that SMEs use for all their financial and accounting. Monite has taken on a big task which they'll tackle via the product's own growing functionality and through its ability to integrate with third-party software. The technology in combination with the experienced founding team has convinced us."
Before launching Monite, Ivan Maryasin, the CEO, led growth for Penta, one of the key German B2B neobanks and realized small businesses struggle a lot more with admin & accounting than they do with banking. Andrey Korchak, Monite CTO, led the tech team at Tochka Bank, the biggest SME neobank in the Eastern Europe, and just finished building a super-app for freelancers with integrated tax & accounting service. Both Ivan and Andrey were keen on the idea to automate admin processes in a unified platform and they started Monite.
Now the team behind Monite builds a perfect financial assistant for the SME owner and automates operational tasks for freelancers and companies up to 100 employees across different industries. Planning to launch the platform later this year, the team now opens a waitlist on its website. With the announced funding round Monite will improve the platform and open new product lines by the end of 2021.