The financial management startup Zeitgold announced a 10 million euro funding round on Monday, 21st January 2019. The round was led by Deutsche Bank and French multinational insurance firm AXA SA with the participation of existing investors Battery Ventures and HV Holtzbrinck Ventures. Saban Ventures and Swiss venture firm Btov Partners also joined the round.
Zeitgold develops a mobile app with the aim to free small businesses with 3 to 20 employees from paperwork. They combine human expertise with artificial intelligence and cover all areas of a small business’s finance processes. The mobile app allows cafés, restaurants and other small businesses to get their paperwork done in less than 10 minutes a day.
Stefan Jeschonnek and Jan Deepen founded the company in 2015 in Berlin together with Israeli-born entrepreneur Kobi Eldar, who previously led an Israeli cyber-security-unit. Before, Stefan and Jan successfully launched a FinTech startup SumUp.
Based in Berlin, Zeitgold also operates a research and development center in Tel Aviv. The startup intends to invest the funds in the R&D facility as well as testing new products with customers.
How it Works
“So our customers are owner-managed companies with three to twenty employees, where the boss really does everything himself and it is exactly for these businesses that we take care of everything that has to do with finance in the background, i.e. bookkeeping, accounting proposals, payroll accounting, but also preparing such things as liquidity management, paying bills with a click, reminders… We basically take over everything that has to do with papers in the broadest sense and that really saves our customer group ten to fifteen hours a month,” Stefan explained the benefits of Zeitgold.
The business owner simply puts all documents in a Zeitgold Box which is picked up once a week by a Zeitgold courrier. The startup then digitizes all documents and creates a personalized to-do list, reminding the owner what needs to be done. This way, the business owners can focus on growing the business rather than the daunting paperwork.