Developed by former executives from Qonto and Swile, Pivot enhances procurement management through user-friendly interfaces and AI-driven automation.
Today, the French startup Pivot has announced a Pre-Seed funding round of €5 million.
Established in 2023 by former leaders of French unicorns Qonto and Swile, Pivot offers comprehensive spend control software tailored for procurement teams.
Seamless integrations with ERPs and company tools enable quick implementation without the need for third-party integrators. The user-friendly interfaces promote easy adoption among employees, eliminating the need for extensive training.
For finance, legal, compliance, and security teams, Pivot provides automated processes that significantly reduce manual work and endless email exchanges.
Effective procurement management is now vital for companies looking to maximize their profitability.
However, the procurement sector is still dominated by outdated tools designed nearly two decades ago, which, due to their excessive features, result in counterproductive complexity. This leads to an average implementation period of 9 months, requiring substantial intervention from integrators.
Pivot’s co-founders recognized the lack of solutions that met their expectations, so they created the first modern procurement tool that helps companies control spending while enhancing their teams.
According to Romain Libeau, Co-founder & CEO of Pivot:
“I became familiar with procurement at Swile when we established the division to boost profitability by managing and optimizing spending.
I assessed the solutions available in the market and quickly realized that it would take too long to gauge their impact.
When I saw the interfaces and complexity of the existing software, I anticipated a significant adoption barrier. I couldn’t see how we could introduce this to our employees during a period of change management.”
Having already revolutionised their respective industries, Marc-Antoine Lacroix (CTO and CPO of neobank Qonto), Romain Libeau (COO of employee benefits fintech Swile), and Estelle Giuly (workflow automation expert, previously at Wave.ai and Nuxeo) have assembled a team of experts from France’s leading scale-ups (Qonto, Doctolib, Payfit, Wave, 360Learning, Swile) and developed a radically innovative solution.
Pivot is built on three core principles:
- An intuitive user interface ensures immediate adoption by all employees, regardless of their financial expertise.
- Interoperability with company applications, such as communication tools, ERPs, and specialized tools like Leeway, Okta, and BambooHR.
- AI-driven automations that relieve finance teams of numerous manual tasks, boosting their productivity and allowing them to focus on high-value tasks.
Funding has been secured from venture capital firms (Visionaries, Emblem, Cocoa, Anamcara, Financière Saint James), as well as accomplished entrepreneurs and investors like Loic Soubeyrand (founder of Swile), Steve Anavi (co-founder of Qonto), Hanno Renner (co-founder of Personio), and Oliver Samwer (co-founder of Rocket Internet).
Robert Lacher, Founding Partner at Visionaries Club, commented: “Established players from the 1990s failed to modernize their architecture and create contemporary, interoperable SaaS applications.
Today, customers are seeking lean, self-service, ready-to-use, API-driven, modular, and user-friendly interfaces. Pivot offers a fresh approach that is loved by both companies and their employees.”
In the upcoming weeks, Pivot intends to launch its solution in European countries and has already gained the support of its initial customers, including the French Unicorn Voodoo.
