Brussels Startup Chift Secures $11.4M to Revolutionize European Fintech Connectivity

Jan de Vries · 2026-09-14

Chift, a Brussels-based startup, just raised €10.5 million ($11.4 million) in Series A funding to become Europe's financial connectivity layer. If you're in the fintech space, this is one to watch. ### The Funding Round The round was led by BlackFin Capital Partners, a European FinTech specialist managing over $4.3 billion in assets. Existing investors Entourage, Shapers, Seeder Fund, and Wallonie Entreprendre also participated. "Financial data connectivity is genuinely hard to build, particularly in Europe, where data sits across dozens of local systems that were never designed to talk to each other," said Pauline Brunel, Investment Director at BlackFin. "That difficulty is what makes Chift's position valuable. And AI raises the stakes further: agents are only as good as the data they can access." ### What Chift Does Founded in 2022 by Gauthier Henroz, Henry Hertoghe, and Matthieu Hertoghe, Chift provides a single unified API that connects software companies to over 120 financial systems—accounting, invoicing, point-of-sale, e-commerce, payments, and property management. This eliminates the need to build and maintain separate integrations. For example, an invoicing platform can use Chift to route customer invoices into 40 different accounting tools without integrating with each one individually. That's a massive time-saver for developers. ### The AI Angle Chift is also orchestrating how AI systems and agents handle financial data. Through its Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, AI agents can securely retrieve and push data across its network, handling authentication and access control. Developers building AI features don't have to manage credentials system by system. "AI and e-invoicing are rebuilding the entire financial software market, and businesses run on more tools than ever," said Gauthier Henroz, CEO and co-founder. "Interoperability is becoming the defining problem of European SMB finance. Its fragmentation makes that harder to build than anywhere, as systems are split across 27 countries. That is exactly why we build the infrastructure that connects it all." ### Traction and Growth Since its €2.3 million ($2.5 million) Seed round in 2024, Chift has seen revenue grow more than tenfold. The team has expanded to 35 people, and its platform is used by over 150 software companies to connect more than 50,000 SMEs across 10+ European countries. Notable clients include FinTechs like Revolut, Qonto, Pennylane, and Mollie. "We are proud to back Gauthier, Henry and Matthieu in making Chift the connectivity infrastructure for business software in the AI era," added Brunel. ### What's Next Chift plans to use the new capital to expand into every major European market and deepen its AI capabilities, connecting more AI products into financial data. It's also moving toward integrations that configure themselves rather than requiring manual setup. By 2028, the company aims to become Europe's go-to provider of financial connectivity. > "Interoperability is becoming the defining problem of European SMB finance." — Gauthier Henroz, CEO of Chift For those building in the European fintech space, Chift's approach to solving fragmentation is worth watching. As AI continues to reshape financial software, the ability to seamlessly connect data across systems will be a key differentiator.