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-off purchases, usage-based billing and more.
Hyperline raised an initial €4 million funding round from Index Ventures back in 2023 ($4.1 million at today’s exchange rate). And Index Ventures is doubling down on this investment as it is investing another $10 million in the startup.
While billing seems like a straightforward issue, it becomes a tedious problem once you start scaling. “With billing, what’s time-consuming, is really the day-to-day operations. Every day, when you have more than 200 or 300 customers, someone has to go and check that everything is correct,” founder and CEO Lucas Bédout told TechCrunch.
Sometimes, pricing isn’t right. Other times, you forgot to add some items to the invoice or the client is asking for a partial reimbursement. And, of course, automatic payments fail fairly regularly for one reason or another.
“At the beginning, we said to ourselves, we’ll look at the current tools like Chargebee, and we’ll do a little better than them. Except that 20% better is nice, but everything has changed so much that now it’s just different. 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 instance, clients can set custom pricing on the fly or add some usage-based component so that customers pay for what they use. Hyperline also handles invoices directly.
And when it’s time to pay, Hyperline doesn’t process payments directly but takes care of that part for you. “We manage the entire value chain except payments … However, we do something that’s pretty cool about payments. We position ourselves as an orchestrator. Our customers don’t use payment processors directly,” Bédout said.
Instead of juggling between different tabs to interact with Stripe, GoCardless, Airwallex or another payment processor, Hyperline acts as the interface to interact with these payment providers. It makes it easier to use multiple payment providers depending on the country or the payment method.
Customers usually get started with the web interface. They connect Hyperline to their CRM so that sales teams can create quotes directly from the CRM. They also connect the platform with the accounting software to process invoices and reconciliate payments.
But Hyperline offers an API as well, which can be particularly useful to sync events directly from a data warehouse for usage-based billing.
There are currently 14 people working for Hyperline, but the company expects to grow to 25 employees in the near future. Clients include Lokki, Malou, ScorePlay, Gladia and Formance.
“The majority of our customers today generate between €3 and €10 million in revenue,” Bédout said. But Hyperline already thinks it can work with bigger companies that handle a large volume of invoices. That will require working with integration companies. And it’s something that Hyperline is already testing.
