Translucent – an accounting platform solving the financial management problems of multi-entity and multi-national businesses – recently announced it has raised a £5 million seed round co-led by Chalfen Ventures and LocalGlobe. This follows a £2.7 million pre-seed round less than six months ago, bringing its total investment to £7.7 million.
This accelerated fundraising highlights the significant demand Translucent is experiencing for its multi-entity accounting and financial management platform.
Translucent was launched in London by CEO Michael Wood, who co-founded Dext (formerly Receipt Bank), which was acquired by leading software investor Hg in 2021 for several hundred million GBP, one of the UK’s largest SaaS exits. Dext is used by over 10,000 accounting firms worldwide, with over 1 million users.
The company is backed by prominent angel investors, including Co-founder and former CTO of Xero Craig Walker, Co-founder and former Managing Director of Xero UK, Gary Turner, and founders from fintech and accounting-tech leaders, such as GoCardless, Jeeves, Karbon, Libeo, ComplyAdvantage, Ignition, Hubdoc, and KashFlow.
The Translucent platform enables multi-entity businesses to unify their financial data and workflows for the first time by providing a suite of apps on top of existing accounting software such as Xero, QuickBooks, and Sage. And the first app, ‘Search,’ is available today, the second app, ‘Group Reporting’ is now in Beta, and the third app ‘Live Sheets’ will soon be available to testers. The funding round will be used to develop further apps, including ‘Intercompany Transactions,’ ‘BI & Analytics’ and ‘Financial Close.’
The impact of globalization and COVID-19 has dramatically accelerated the trend of companies becoming multinational or multi-entity earlier than ever, as outlined by Andreessen Horowitz’s ‘Default Global’ thesis. But SMB accounting systems are designed to hold a single company’s data in a single location, so this trend has forced finance teams to stitch together a patchwork of SMB accounting software, which creates numerous problems, including fragmented, siloed, and messy data.
The company enables businesses to continue to use the SMB solutions they currently use but unifies their financial data into a single location where it can be seen, used, and edited. And Translucent is used by businesses worldwide, from software companies to restaurant groups to property developers.
Translucent integrates with existing accounting solutions, stores all the data in a single location, and harmonizes the data to provide clients with a single financial system of record. And then it provides a suite of apps to use the data; Apps include Group Reporting, Intercompany Transactions, and Financial Close. Translucent will use the additional funding to build out its platform and suite of apps.
KEY QUOTES:
“Since announcing Translucent in March we have been delighted by the volume of interest we have received. This fundraising allows us to further build out our platform and solve the accounting and finance problems faced by multi-entity businesses.”
— Michael Wood, Founder and CEO of Translucent
“Translucent’s insight is that unified accounting data can be the basis of financial and operational insight for every multi-entity business. Michael is the best entrepreneur in the world to build a business based on this insight. And the opportunity to create a compound startup that drives insight for multi-entity businesses is huge; so joining the Translucent family fits perfectly into my mission of backing software startups whose technology will fundamentally alter the way companies operate.”
— Mike Chalfen at Chalfen Ventures
“The demand from multinationals for Translucent is as significant as it is unsurprising. Michael and his team have built a platform that is solving a very real problem for an ever-growing number of businesses around the world, and we’re delighted to be backing him again.”
— Remus Brett at LocalGlobe VC
