Palm, a Sweden and Netherlands based financial technology company created to streamline cash management for enterprise treasury teams, announced that it has raised €5.5 million in seed funding. The investment round was led by Speedinvest and Target Global, with participation from Upfin, Liquid2, and Greens. Notable angel investors include Job van der Voort (Founder & CEO, Remote) and Philippe Teixeira da Mota (former Hedosophia partner).
Palm’s platform allows Treasury teams to make informed decisions on moving money between hundreds of bank accounts and local subsidiaries. By providing an all-in-one view of past and future cash flows, Palm creates a control panel that guides daily money movement, reducing operating cash balances by over 30% while outperforming existing human-generated forecasts in 3 out of 4 accounts.
The company’s founders are on a mission to guide the world’s money by optimising how the largest enterprises utilise their resources. With more than a decade’s experience managing billion-dollar treasuries at companies like Uber, Levi’s and Remote, Palm Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Gurjit Pannu saw an opportunity to significantly improve how companies manage and move money. His Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Christian Sobkowski meanwhile has a track record launching novel financial products, having built Juni’s credit card program up from $0 to its $106 million debt raise and expanded PayPal’s Lending business across Europe.
Responsible for moving $3 billion a month while he was at Uber, Gurjit Pannu said: “Imagine your electricity getting cut because of insufficient funds due to not moving money to your current account in time. Now imagine that across hundreds of accounts and dozens of countries. That’s the daily challenge for treasury teams – juggling multiple systems to track and predict cash flow across global operations. Having implemented incumbent solutions three times to solve this without seeing meaningful change, we knew it was time to build something better”.
European treasurers’ priority
Palm’s solution addresses a critical need in the market. According to the European Association of Corporate Treasurers’ annual survey, cash forecasting has been the top priority for European treasurers for the past five years. The platform’s ability to implement in weeks rather than months sets it apart from legacy systems, which often require lengthy setup processes. Treasury teams are then equipped with an automated forecast that continuously improves its accuracy by using a proprietary AI toolkit specific to each business account.
“Palm represents the next generation of financial tools that are disrupting the enterprise CFO stack,” said Olga Shikhantsova, Partner at Speedinvest. “As legacy software reaches end-of-life, CFOs are seeking AI-enabled solutions that can keep pace with their evolving needs. Palm’s deep understanding of treasury challenges, particularly from first hand experience by Gurjit across a wide breadth of organisations, combined with their innovative approach, positions them perfectly to lead this transformation.”
Palm plans to use the funding to expand its team and is already hiring across product, engineering, and go-to-market functions to help it build the financial tissue layer for global enterprises. This headcount growth is designed to enable Palm to forge more partnerships with large consultancies, and continue its expansion across Europe, the UK, and the US.
“We’re thrilled to support Palm as they revolutionise enterprise treasury operations. The team’s unique insight into the industry’s complexities, combined with their ability to automate manual tasks such as data sourcing, pattern recognition, and cash forecasting, will empower treasury teams to operate at unprecedented levels of efficiency,” added Khalil Hefaf, who led the investment on behalf of Target Global.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2024/09/swedish-dutch-startup-palm-raises-e5-5-million-to-modernise-cash-management-for-global-businesses/
