Company card start-up Pleo valued at $1.7 billion, becoming Europe’s latest fintech unicorn

Danish start-up Pleo, a firm that provides expense management solutions and linked smart payment cards to corporations, has completed a US$150m equity funding round. 

This most recent funding brings Pleo’s valuation to US$1.7bn, making it Europe’s newest private-owned unicorn. 

Bain Capital Ventures and Thrive Capital were the leaders of this investment round, becoming a part of what is now Pleo’s most memorable feat so far.

Speaking during a CNBC interview, Jeppe Rindom, CEO and co-founder of Pleo said, “The whole digitization and automation of finance processes has been going on for a while.”

Pleo gets most of its revenue (up to 70%) from charges deducted from its merchant’s accounts. The company also offers paid subscriptions, which generates most of the remaining revenue portion.

Jeppe Rindom and Niccolo Perra, before founding Pleo, now one of the first unicorns to emerge from Denmark, were early employees at Tradeshift, another unicorn (valued at US$1.1bn) which later moved from Copenhagen to San Francisco.