French payroll startup Linc has closed an €8.5M seed round backed by more than 100 business angels, a strategy to embed industry insiders directly into its cap table rather than rely on a single lead VC.
70% of its current customers came through word of mouth, a signal that in a market where trust is everything, the product is doing the selling.
The raise brings total funding to €12.5M, with Linc targeting 500 customers and €5M in annual recurring revenue within 18 months.
France processes 27 million payslips every month. Almost none of the software handling them was built by people who truly understood what they were processing. Baptiste Le Bihan spent a decade watching that gap widen before deciding to close it himself.
The result is Linc, a payroll platform built exclusively for the 15,000 accounting and payroll firms that manage payroll on behalf of French small businesses, and an €8.5 million seed round closed not with a single anchor VC, but with more than 100 business angels recruited deliberately from inside the payroll, HR, chartered accountancy, and fintech worlds.
