Zervant announces today that it has raised €1.5 million to help expand its invoicing and accounting platform outside of the home Scandinavian market with a target set on Germany and France. The funding came from Conor, the Helsinki-based VC with €70 million under management, as well as Zervant’s existing investors.
Rather than building accounting software for accountants, the Espoo-based company has been focused more on Europe’s 20 million SMEs in the service market who need an invoicing tool that can also keep track of cashflow. Zervant’s web-based tool makes sense for companies even as small as a single employee, and according to CEO Mattias Hansson roughly half of their customers do accounting themselves, while the other half are using Zervant with an accounting firm.
Currently Zervant is used by 40,000 small businesses and is growing. “We haven’t started much marketing but we’re growing at 3,000 businesses a month.” says Hansson, pointing out that growth number has tripled since this summer.
On the product side, Zervant has been around long enough to give you key features, but last month the platform saw a fresh redesign that placed a much more graphical emphasis on your numbers and improved reports.
We’re a user of Zervant, and have found it to be a clean and easy tool that makes sense for a company our size, and is a lot easier to send invoices and keep track of expenses without deep accounting jargon. According to Hansson the product is able to be localized into any country in a matter of weeks, but with a good focus on German and French SMES, and after its fresh redesign, we can see the product taking off.
