Chift raises €10.5M to wire Europe's fragmented financial software together

Why it matters

Chift is turning Europe's country-by-country financial software fragmentation into infrastructure. The Series A backs expansion into additional European markets and integrations for AI products that require access to financial data.

Computable reported that Chift, the Brussels software infrastructure provider founded by Gauthier Henroz, Henry Hertoghe and Matthieu Hertoghe, raised a €10.5M Series A. The founders started Chift to spare other companies from rebuilding the same financial integrations country by country.

Tech.eu reported the financing on September 14th. BlackFin Capital Partners led the round, joined by existing investors Entourage, Shapers, Seeder Fund and Wallonie Entreprendre. Chift has not disclosed its valuation or the amount contributed by each investor.

Gauthier Henroz, Henry Hertoghe and Matthieu Hertoghe founded Chift in 2022 after experiencing the cost and maintenance burden of software integrations firsthand. Henroz is CEO, Henry Hertoghe is CTO and earlier coverage identified Matthieu Hertoghe as CCO. Their founding complaint became a straightforward product: one API that gives software vendors access to accounting, invoicing, payment, point-of-sale, e-commerce and property-management systems.

That focus matters in Europe, where a product that works with one country's dominant accounting package can still arrive in the next market effectively disconnected. Chift is betting that handling those local differences centrally will make its integration layer harder to replace as its connector library grows.

The round buys coverage

Chift says its unified APIs now connect with over 120 financial systems across six categories. Software vendors integrate with Chift once, then offer their customers connections to multiple underlying products without assigning engineers to build and maintain every connector separately.

Maintenance is much of the product. Chift's broader challenge is maintaining connections to country-specific and on-premise financial systems whose authentication, data structures and API behavior change over time.

Chift's 2024 seed announcement said it had more than 50 live connectors across four categories and customers in five countries, including Pennylane, Agicap, Mollie, Qonto and Pleo.

The Series A brings Chift's publicly disclosed seed and Series A financing to at least €12.8M, combining it with the €2.3M seed round. Chift plans to spend the new capital on additional European markets and product development, including tools that reduce the manual configuration required when activating an integration.

AI products need financial-system access

Chift is also recasting its integration layer for AI products that need access to financial data held inside existing business systems. Those products still need reliable connections to the accounting and payment software where the underlying data lives.

Henroz told Tech.eu that interoperability was "the defining problem of European SMB finance." His timing rests on two shifts happening together: AI developers want structured access to operational data, while e-invoicing rules are moving a growing share of financial work into machine-readable systems.

The European Commission says its 2026 work program for VAT in the Digital Age covers implementation activities planned for 2026 and supports the package's rollout. Individual countries are moving on their own timetables, preserving the local complexity Chift was built to absorb.

Regulation does not guarantee Chift distribution. Software providers can maintain integrations internally or buy from competing unified API vendors. Apideck currently advertises more than 200 integrations across seven unified APIs: accounting, human resources, customer relationship management, recruiting, e-commerce, file storage and issue tracking. Codat sells standardized accounting, banking and commerce connections with a stronger emphasis on banks, lenders and other financial products.

Chift's response is specialization. Henroz and the Hertoghe brothers are concentrating on European finance systems, including country-specific and on-premise products that broader integration platforms may have less incentive to support. Each added connector can serve every Chift customer, while every customer gives Chift another reason to maintain that connector. That compounding catalog is Chift's proposed defense against broader rivals.

The AI portion remains an execution bet. Chift says it plans to build integrations that configure themselves with less manual setup, but Chift has not attached a setup-time target or public performance benchmark to the work. The immediate value remains the less fashionable job the founders started with in 2022: keeping Europe's financial software connected after the first integration ships.