French startup iBanFirst, which lets SMBs do cross-border payments in 30 currencies, raises €21M Series C led by Elaia and Bpifrance's Large Venture fund
Romain Dillet / TechCrunch :
Context & Ripple Effects
iBanFirst's €21M Series C lands mid-way through a 2020 funding run for French SMB-focused fintech: just months earlier, Qonto raised $115M Series C for its B2B neobank, and Sendinblue followed with a $160M Series B for SMB marketing. iBanFirst occupies the FX slice of that stack — cross-border payments across 30 currencies — rather than the banking or invoicing layers.
The lead investors matter as much as the amount: Elaia is a repeat French fintech backer, and Bpifrance's Large Venture fund is the state-backed vehicle that anchors late-stage rounds for French scale-ups, keeping capital onshore as these companies grow.
First-order effects
- iBanFirst gains the capital to scale its multi-currency payments platform for SMBs, while Elaia and Bpifrance's Large Venture take a lead position in one of the few French fintechs focused specifically on foreign exchange rather than domestic banking.
Second-order effects
- Adjacent players in the French SMB finance stack — Qonto on business banking, and invoice-and-payments players like Libeo, which raised a €20M Series A a year later — face pressure to bundle FX or partner for it, since SMBs increasingly expect cross-border capability inside their primary finance tool.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the SMB financial back office keeps splitting into specialized funded layers — banking, FX, invoicing, payments infrastructure like Budget Insight's payment initiation and data aggregation — with Bpifrance anchoring enough of them that Paris builds a vertically complete SMB fintech cluster, ahead of inevitable consolidation among the layers.
The trend: French SMB fintech is raising ever-larger state-anchored rounds, with each specialized layer of the SMB finance stack — banking, FX, invoicing, payments — scaling independently before converging.