Malibou, a Y Combinator-backed French payroll startup, just raised $3.3 million using this 11-slide pitch deck
- Malibou, a French HR and payroll startup, has raised $3.3 million in seed funding.
- The startup targets small and medium-sized businesses in France that lack efficient HR tools.
- Malibou aims to offer expert payroll support and modern HRIS, competing with firms like PayFit.
Malibou, a French startup that helps small businesses with payroll and HR, has raised $3.3 million in seed funding.
Founded in 2023, the Y Combinator-backed business claims that the complexities of French labor relations and the many tools used to manage employee payments make things difficult for employers.
"We met many French founders and HR managers who were super frustrated by how payroll was handled for their company," Maxence Drummond, CEO of Malibou and a former partner at French VC firm Breega, told Business Insider.
"We quickly realized that it was hard to find a good mix between expert payroll support and a great Human Resources Information System (HRIS) at the same place. This mix is easily found in the US and UK, where we both lived; it was time to bring that to France."
Based in Paris, Malibou will effectively compete with existing tech options in the French market, such as Payfit, a unicorn company that has raised almost $500 million in external funding. It lets businesses generate payslips, manage employee vacation days, and submit expense forms through a single interface.
Payfit "had tremendous success and is mainly targeting rather small companies. But we differentiate as we don't want to replace payroll experts," Drummond added.
"We realized that French payroll is so complex that most companies don't necessarily want to internalize payroll production but rely on experts that can do the job for them while benefiting from a super modern HRIS to help them gain time and retain employees. We are also much cheaper," he added.
The deal was led by Breega alongside Y Combinator and FCVC. The funding will go toward increasing its team of 10 staff across product, tech and marketing, Drummond said.
Check out Malibou's 11-slide pitch deck below: