French startup Hyperline hopes to build the next generation of Chargebee. Over the past two years, the startup has built a new billing platform that can be used for recurring subscriptions, one-time purchases, usage-based billing, and more.

Hyperline raised €4 million in Series A funding from Index Ventures back in 2023 ($4.1 million at today's exchange rates). Index Ventures is doubling down and will invest another $10 million in the startup.

While billing may seem like a simple problem, it turns into a tedious one once you start scaling. "With billing, the most time-consuming thing is the day-to-day operations. Every day, when you have more than 200 or 300 customers, someone has to go check that everything is correct," founder and CEO Lucas Bédout told TechCrunch.

Sometimes, pricing is incorrect. Sometimes, you forget to add some items to the invoice or the client asks for partial reimbursement. Of course, automatic payments often fail for one reason or another.

"In the beginning, we said to ourselves, we'll look at the current tools, like Chargebee, and we'll do a little bit better than them. Apart from a 20% improvement, which is nice, everything has changed a lot and now everything is It’s different. Now, people are looking for automation, they don’t want to manually process invoices, send reminders, create quotes, etc.”

In addition to subscription management, Hyperline has added other pricing models. For example, customers can set custom pricing on the fly or add some usage-based components so customers pay for what they use. Hyperline also handles invoices directly.

When it's time to make a payment, Hyperline doesn't handle the payment directly, but handles that part for you. "We manage the entire value chain except payments...but we do some really cool things on the payments side. We position ourselves as an orchestrator. Our customers don't use payment processors directly," Bédout said.

Rather than switching between different tabs to interact with Stripe, GoCardless, Airwallex, or other payment processors, Hyperline acts as an interface for interacting with these payment providers. It makes it easier for you to use multiple payment providers based on country or payment method.

Customers typically start with a web interface. They connected Hyperline to the CRM so the sales team could create quotes directly from the CRM. They also connect the platform with accounting software to process invoices and reconcile payments.

But Hyperline also provides an API that is particularly useful for synchronizing events directly from the data warehouse for usage-based billing.

Hyperline currently has 14 employees, but the company expects to grow to 25 employees in the near future. Customers include Lokki, Malou, ScorePlay, Glagia and Formance.

“Today, most of our clients have revenues between €3 and €10 million,” says Bédout. But Hyperline already thinks it can work with large companies that handle large volumes of invoices. This requires working with an integration company. Hyperline is already testing this.