Hyperline secures $10 million for its automated billing platform

French startup Hyperline wants to build the next generation Chargebee. Over the past two years, the startup has built a new billing platform that can be used for recurring subscriptions, one-time purchases, usage-based billing, and more.

Hyperline has raised an initial funding round of 4 million euros from Index Ventures in 2023 ($4.1 million at today’s exchange rate). And Index Ventures is doubling this investment as it invests another $10 million in the startup.

While billing seems like a simple problem, it becomes a tedious problem when you start scaling. “With billing, what takes time is actually the day-to-day operations. Every day, when you have more than 200 or 300 customers, someone has to go and make sure everything is correct,” founder and CEO Lucas Bédout told TechCrunch.

Sometimes the price is not right. Sometimes you forgot to add some items to the invoice or the client asks for partial reimbursement. And, of course, automatic payments fail quite regularly for one reason or another.

“In the beginning, we said to ourselves that we will look at current tools like Chargebee and we will be a little better than them. Except 20% better is nice, but everything has changed so much that it’s just different now. Now people are looking for automation, they don’t want to manually process invoices, send reminders, create quotes, etc.” Bédout said.

In addition to subscription management, Hyperline has added other pricing models. For example, clients can set custom pricing on the fly or add a usage-based component so that users pay for what they use. Hyperline also processes invoices directly.

And when it’s time to pay, Hyperline doesn’t process payments directly, it takes care of that part for you. “We manage the entire value chain apart from payments… However, we are doing something that is pretty cool about payments. We position ourselves as an orchestrator. Our clients do not use payment processors directly,” said Bédout.

Instead of juggling different cards to interact with Stripe, GoCardless, Airwallex or another payment processor, Hyperline acts as an interface to interact with these payment providers. Facilitates the use of multiple payment providers depending on the country or payment method.

Customers usually start with the web interface. They connect Hyperline to their CRM so that sales teams can create offers directly from the CRM. They also connect the platform with accounting software to process invoices and reconcile payments.

But Hyperline also offers an API, which can be especially useful for synchronizing events directly from a data warehouse for usage-based billing.

Hyperline currently employs 14 people, but the company expects to grow to 25 employees in the near future. Clients include Lokki, Malou, ScorePlay, Gladia and Formance.

“Most of our customers generate between 3 and 10 million euros in revenue today,” said Bédout. But Hyperline already thinks it can work with larger companies that process a large volume of invoices. This will require cooperation with integration companies. And that’s something Hyperline is already testing.