Hero has built an ambitious banking product that aggregates accounts, IBANs, payment acceptance, payment cards and credit products into a single platform for small companies. The startup offers retailer payment solutions via API, e-commerce plugins and payment links, with transaction fees starting at 0.4% + €0.15. Its primary revenue plan centers on credit offerings: supplier invoice financing and invoice advance products that give customers up to 90 days to repay. Hero built its own core banking system rather than relying on banking-as-a-service partners and has developed an internal risk-scoring engine using public and private data. The company is still awaiting regulator approval from the ACPR for its payment services. Founder and CEO Roland Jais-Nielsen previously founded Merci Handy, bringing operator experience with SMB cash-flow challenges. Hero is a Paris-based fintech founded in 2021 that provides a full-stack payments platform for B2B SMEs, covering liquidity and digital payments across all sales channels. The company began as an intermediary for B2B transactions, taking on financial and credit risk to optimize counterparties' cash flows. Hero has built a horizontally integrated platform that centralizes sales channels and payment methods, improves underwriting, automates end-to-end processes, and integrates with third-party B2B software such as ERPs, marketplaces and accounting tools. Its solution handles offline, online and in-store payments and aims to streamline procure-to-pay for buyers and order-to-cash for suppliers while offering instantaneous financing terms. After seven months of inception Hero onboarded over 200 merchants, powered more than 10,000 transactions and reports growth of about 30% month-over-month. The company is using the new funding to scale its solution and accelerate adoption among underserved SMEs.

Total raised

$25M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Jun 2024