Small and medium businesses are getting more love in the world of fintech these days, and one example of that is the growth of a startup out of Sweden. Mynt, which has built an AI-based platform for corporate cards and spend management catering to SMEs, has closed a round of €22 million ($23 million) on the back of seeing its customer base grow to 12,000 SMEs from just 3,000 a year ago.
Vor Capital, a London-based investment firm that had previously backed Mynt, is leading the round, with other previous backers CNI and Incore also participating. Mynt has now raised around €50 million and from what we understand this funding puts its valuation in the region of €200 million ($210 million).
Mynt got its start when two of its co-founders, Baltsar Sahlin (CEO) and Johan Obermayer (CPO) were colleagues at Ericsson, the Swedish telecoms giant, where expenses were a complete pain to manage, ironic given that the company is technically dedicated to the next generation of data communications.
They worked for one of the biggest companies in Europe, yet they knew that the situation was even more dire for smaller businesses, who are often overlooked when it comes to IT services, from past experience of working in and with smaller businesses.
Image Credits:Mynt (opens in a new window) under a license.
“I experienced this myself, how difficult it is to issue cards and do expense management. The pain points were really the driving force for Mynt,” said Sahlin in an interview. When Mynt first started in 2018, there were very few options for SMEs in particular, he said. “For us, it was more about being between the banks and accounting systems, providing a solution that solves that problem for SMEs.”
They paired up with Magnus Wideberg, a systems engineer who has worked for a variety of financial businesses, to start Mynt to address that gap, starting first with businesses in the Nordics, and now — with this round — beginning its European expansion into the U.K. and other markets.
Mynt’s business today provides company cards with Visa its primary partner. (Sahlin said it considers American Express “a competitor.”)
Alongside the card services, it provides spend management tools and automated integrations with major accounting apps. Among the features it gives its SME customers are ways to set up and automatically manage out-of-pocket expenses, automatic receipt matching, virtual cards, individual spend limits to better match spent to budget, a mobile app to manage expenses on the go, and analytics tools to help customers better understand how budget is being used, leaning heavily on AI for the automations, Sahlin said.
Interestingly, it also has an embedded finance play: Mynt has built an API that lets it integrate with third parties, powering card-issuing services for enterprise resource planning businesses, banks, and fleet and fuel providers.
The other important point, said Sahlin, is that Mynt focused its efforts on its region alone initially because the Nordic ecosystem is different “when it comes to accounting and payment rails.” Its products, designed for companies of between two and 500 employees, with its average customer size currently at 50 users.
Mynt is facing some large competitors, out of its own region and beyond.
Pleo, based in Denmark, has made a mark in expense management, also targeting SMEs. It was last valued at $4.7 billion when it raised $200 million in 2021. It’s not clear how that valuation has changed since then: the last money the company took in was $42 million in debt, earlier this year, for its credit products.
But Fortnox (coincidentally, like Mynt, also a play on a reference to a place where money is held) — which also builds expense management and other financial tools for SMEs and is publicly traded and also has a valuation in the range of $4 billion — is actually a partner: Mynt powers the company’s corporate card services.
In the U.S. there are many companies chasing the SME opportunity here, including Finally (raised $200 million in debt and equity in September 2024), Emburse, potentially IPO-bound Brex and Ramp (raised $150 million in April 2024). Big numbers do not always mean hockey sticks, however: Brex earlier this year went through significant management changes and layoffs/restructuring after a period of growing too fast.
Mynt might be facing a number of competitors, but there is an argument to be made for there being room for more than a few companies in this space.
Expense management remains one of the big pain points in the world of work: accounts departments spend a lot of time trying to make sure spend is itemised correctly and is authorised, employees are not accountants and will sometimes get these things wrong.
The SME sector has added challenges: accounting departments are smaller, and in some cases might even be nonexistent (it’s you, you’re the accounting department, and sales, and IT, and admin…), creating an opening for solutions that automate time-consuming work like expenses admin. And typically, smaller businesses are a second thought when it comes to building new and more efficient services, so they don’t
There are just over 26 million SMBs in the European Union alone, making up about 99% of all businesses, meaning the 12,000 SMBs that Mynt currently has on its books a very small dent in the market. A report last year published by Pymnts spelled it out: only around one-quarter of SMBs use corporate cards in the U.S., one of the more advanced markets — meaning that there remains a largely untapped market.