2024-01-28 16:30:00
What I aim to do is help VSEs and SMEs no longer suffer from slow payment times because this can cause them to sink. » Karl Abouzeid lives between Cannes and Beirut – his hometown – and founded his startup Fundbot in Nice, in 2020, at the Innovation Hub (formerly CEEI).
We rewind. Karl Abouzeid obtained a bachelor’s degree in business and marketing in Switzerland, he returned to Lebanon, to Beirut where he founded his first company. It’s 2015 and the entrepreneur is creating a platform that connects logistics companies with carriers. His clients ? “DHL, CMA-CGM… And that’s when I realized the difficulties that extended payment terms might cause for small and medium-sized structures.” He closed the company and founded Fundbot. Why on the Côte d’Azur? Because that’s where he got married and started his family. “A heart affair with the Côte d’Azur! With the proximity of the tech and innovation ecosystem of Sophia Antipolis, it made sense. And I am proud of it.”
Fundbot is therefore a platform that allows banks to digitalize the financing processes of MSMEs and SMEs. You are a company, you invoice your customers who must pay you within two weeks, three months, six months, which means that you regularly have a substantial cash flow “outside”. This is where Fundbot comes in. Directly from your accounting software – any – your invoices are transmitted and analyzed by its system, transferred immediately to each client who agrees to honor them. This means that the bank can give you this money for other investments or current bills that you have to pay. The bank in which you have your accounts must of course have signed a partnership with the startup.
Reduce fraud
“What is still very often done manually or even invoice by invoice by an operator, is now entirely digitalized. Ultimately, operations which usually take between three weeks and a month are done in just 24 hours.”
Another advantage, on the banking side this time, “This will make it easier to accept managing VSEs/SMEs because, currently, the cost for the services attached to them is high due to lack of yield.”
Cherry on the cake, “The digitalization of the process makes it possible to drastically reduce fraud. No more invoices paid twice, the software detects duplicates, hazardous invoices… This is a significant saving.”
Since its launch in 2020, Funbot has come a long way. Winner of the Réseau Entreprendre in 2022, CEO Karl Abouzeid has just raised 1.4 million euros from five investment funds including Oryx Fund from the very select English group Hambro Perks. Joined by MEVP, Aditum, Flat6LABS and PLUS.VC.“I can say that it is a source of pride to see these funds come to seek out a Riviera fintech because here, innovation and tech are not the most popular areas. It would rather be tourism.” A fundraising which will serve to boost the international expansion of the structure which has around ten employees, all located in Beirut.
From international to the French market
“I would like to hire in Nice, Beirut and Dubai. Thanks to this round of funding, we will also work on advanced functionalities such as high-performance cybersecurity modules and above all adapted to each country. If in France and more widely in Europe, the regulations are clear and unified by the European Central Bank, elsewhere, each country has very specific regulations and we must make sure to respect them. It’s a lot of work.”
FundBot has also just won a partnership with Visa in the MENA region (North Africa and the Middle East), an area that it approached first because emerging countries are “fond of digitalization and want to move very quickly now” . Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Dubai… so many countries where the Fundbot solution is deployed with banks or fintechs. Already more than 130,000 transactions have passed through the platform.
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