What’s solid here: Finextra, EU-Startups, and Tech.eu all independently confirm the €10.5 million Series A, led by BlackFin Capital Partners with existing backers Entourage, Shapers, Seeder Fund, and Wallonie Entreprendre returning. The founding story — Gauthier Henroz, Henry Hertoghe, and Matthieu Hertoghe launching in Brussels in 2022 — and the core product, a unified API into more than 120 accounting, invoicing, payments, and point-of-sale systems, also check out across all three reports. That’s a real, verifiable financial connectivity business with a plausible AI hook: an MCP server that lets agents pull and push financial data without developers managing credentials system by system.
What’s not independently verified: the claim of tenfold revenue growth since a €2.3 million 2024 seed, the count of 35 employees, and the figures of 150-plus software customers reaching 50,000 SMEs across ten-plus countries. Those all trace back to Chift’s own account, relayed by EU-Startups without third-party confirmation — as does the marquee client list of Revolut, Qonto, Pennylane, and Mollie, which reads more like a logo slide than a sourced customer roster.
A €10.5 million round is easy to confirm; a tenfold revenue jump and 50,000-SME reach are the kind of numbers that only a term sheet, a customer reference, or an audited filing actually settles.
The AI framing matters for the data-market beat because BlackFin’s Pauline Brunel is explicitly betting that fragmented European financial data — split across 27 national systems — becomes the bottleneck for agentic finance products, not the models themselves. That’s a coherent thesis, and it’s why connectivity middleware keeps attracting capital even in categories that look like commoditized integration plumbing.
Watch for whether Chift discloses actual customer counts or revenue in a future round, or whether named clients like Revolut and Qonto confirm the relationship on the record — that’s what would move this from a well-funded pitch to a validated infrastructure layer.
Chift, a European startup building a financial connectivity layer for the AI era, has raised €10.5 million in a Series A led by BlackFin Capital Partners.
— Finextra
