Former Stripe executive Sean Mullaney is taking on business banking with a new start-up that aims to simplify finances for growing companies, raising $3 million to support its early growth.
Seapoint, which is targeting VC-backed startups, scale-ups and mid-market companies across Europe and the UK, has developed a platform that combines regulated business accounts and AI-powered automations for expenses, invoice payments, payroll and reporting.
The company, which has spent nine months developing the platform, is currently in private beta and is already working with dozens of VC-backed startups, including employee benefits platform Kota. It plans to launch more widely in the coming months.
It aims to give founders the financial tools they need in one place, from business accounts and corporate cards to payments and treasury management, with AI tools that automate time-consuming financial work. That includes processing invoices from email, categorising expenses, and creating financial reports, saving businesses time and money.
RM Block
“There’s a lot of manual work involved in the day to day financial administration of a company. As soon as you start to scale up your business, the financial processes become quite overwhelming,” Mr Mullaney said. “You have to hire finance teams, you have to outsource these things to accountants. That is a big opportunity cost in terms of capital for business.”
The founding team has significant experience in the fintech sector. It includes Mr Mullaney, who was European chief information officer at Stripe, and a number of his former Stripe colleagues and Tide executives.
The company is targetting what it sees as a poorly served market - companies that are too big for the neobanks but are not big enough for traditional corporate banking.
“It feels like a very big opportunity to help companies who are scaling up to be able to have access to better financial services and better products,” he said. “Now that we have the ability to use AI to automate more complex financial processes for folks who are operating at bigger scale, it’s a really amazing opportunity to rethink banking from first principles.”
The pre-seed funding round was led by Frontline with backing from Tapestry VC and former executives in Stripe, Revolut, Tide and Tines.
“Neobanks have built great products for consumers, but mid-market companies have more complex needs that aren’t yet properly served,” said Will Prendergast, partner at Frontline. “With a deeply experienced fintech team, Seapoint is leveraging recent advances in AI to transform the finance stack and solve this tedious issue for all scaling companies.”
Seapoint plans to grow its product and engineering team, recruiting in Dublin for the latter. It will also add customer success and operations staff.
