Not just another expense management tool — why we invested in finway

We are very excited to back the incredible team behind finway in their journey to empower SMEs to say goodbye to hours of manual work, complicated workarounds and managing multiple fragmented tools along the financial process chain. Welcome to the btov family, team finway!

The market for SME finance is experiencing a shift from manual work to financial workflows set on autopilot. As a result there has been a wave of solutions tackling specific use cases such as expense reimbursements or invoice management over the course of the last years. Being right in the middle of the tech scene, it is easy to forget that tech-savvy startups already using some solutions are only a small fraction of the market. Looking at the much broader market, the vast majority of SMEs are still stuck with legacy tools relying on Excel spreadsheets, pen and paper.

And this is where finway comes in: Since its inception in early 2020, finway is on a mission to improve how SMEs manage their spend-related tasks: By centralizing all tasks on the same platform, finway’s product is built around workflows and streamlines the entire process from purchase request to invoice payment. Moreover, finway manages all kinds of expenses including bank payments as well as card payments.

As a result, finway enables companies to manage their spend workflow without alternating between different platform providers. Moreover, finway is designed to benefit the entire company and not only the finance department. Department leads are able to take real-time control over spending and budgets. Employees can swiftly manage purchase orders, payments and invoice uploads. Therefore, finway is a true “one stop shop” for spend management.

Having known the company for some time, we were able to witness the impressive and rapid development of finway over the last few months.

Here is why we are excited about finway:

💪🏼 Strong team and execution capabilities

All three co-founders bring in relevant skills and demonstrate strong performance within their area of expertise. Moreover, Christian, who joined as Chief Revenue Officer from Personio, complements the team bringing in relevant experience in terms of scaling a B2B SaaS company that sells an all-in-one solution for one department within the SME segment. In addition, given the limited amount of capital and time that have been invested into the business, the team clearly stands out for its fast, capital efficient and result-oriented execution capabilities.

🏅 Great first product

The team puts an extreme focus on product excellence and ease of usability. The current product version stands out for its intuitive and “clean” user interface. All product features are carefully thought through. The team was able to turn complex internal processes into a seamless user experience that enables all stakeholders along the spend workflow to easily collaborate.

🌍 Huge market

While there are serious, well-funded players in the broader market, we feel that the total market size is big enough and allows for more than one relevant player. Despite the competitive situation, there is still a lot of white space with most SMEs having no solution at all in place. We think that finway’s approach of building a holistic spend management solution for card and bank payments constitutes an attractive go-to-market strategy.

Overall, we firmly believe that finway has the potential to disrupt the way SMEs deal with financial processes. We are super excited to be part of this journey 🔮

For more info about finway: check out their website https://finway.de/

To all SMEs, early stage ventures and later stage scale ups who are struggling with keeping up with all their company spendings: Feel free to reach out if you want to learn more about finway — We are happy to tell you more and connect you with the right person within the organization!

To all fellow investors and entrepreneurs: Feel free to reach out to us (ab@btov.vc & lm@btov.vc) if you are interested to learn more about our view on the market or if you would like to get in touch with the founders.