Pento Raises $2.8M to Bring Fully Automated Payroll Software to British SMEs

*Although a monthly occurrence, payroll remains one of the most manual, error-prone and innovation-lacking business processes out there.

*Pento lets companies cut 50-80% off the time they spend on payroll by automating everything from tax reporting to payments, and providing payroll managers with a seamless, modern, and real-time payroll experience.

*The new $2.8m seed round is led by Point Nine Capital, with support from Seedcamp, Hustle Fund, the former Atomico partner, Mattias Ljungman, and existing investors including Futuristic.vc and Preseed Ventures.

Pento, the new payroll service that helps companies automate their full payroll workflow from start to end, has raised $2.8m seed round led by Point Nine Capital, with support from Seedcamp, Hustle Fund, Futuristic.vc and Preseed Ventures. The new investment brings the total funding raised to date to $3.5m for the Danish startup, which launched in 2017.

Pento is on a mission to radically improve the payroll experience for both companies and employees. Pento lets companies cut 50-80% off the time they spend on payroll by automating everything from tax reporting to payments, and, for the first time ever, providing payroll managers with a seamless and real-time payroll experience.

Most companies still rely on spreadsheets, manual bank transfers, emails, and hours of manual work to pay their employees every month. With Pento, companies can run the full payroll process from a single, user-friendly product in a matter of minutes. Users don’t need payroll experience to use the product, and Pento’s instant support via chat or phone makes sure customers get help quickly instead of having to wait hours or days for an email to come back with an answer.

The founders, Jonas Bøgh Larsen, CEO, and Emil Hagbarth Rasmussen, CTO, had experienced first-hand how payroll was a very clunky, error-prone process, which didn’t seem to match what you would expect from software today. They decided to change that, and launched the first version of Pento in 2017.

Jonas comments: “At previous companies, I was responsible for figuring out payroll. I would quickly realise there was no simple and user-friendly product available - only complex, old payroll software. Because of that we ended up with an inflexible and manual process where we would send spreadsheets back and forth to our accountant, making it all feel like we were sent back to a previous decade. Later we realised how bigger companies had the exact same problem, just at a much larger scale. That’s when we decided to go after the opportunity and build a better payroll experience for companies and their employees. Now, 2 years later, it’s becoming clear that the demand for something better is far bigger than we had imagined.”

The new funding will be used to continue Pento’s launch in the UK, improve and build out new features in the product, and support the growing demand from bigger companies and new industries. More than a hundred companies have signed up to Pento’s waitlist in the UK in less than 2 months, and a selected group are already paying their British employees through the platform.

Jonas comments: “We’re really excited to continue the journey with some of the best investors in the game. As we spent more and more time with the team at Point Nine, it became clear that we’re getting a very experienced, hands-on partner on our team. Having support from Seedcamp and our existing investors made everything come together very nicely, and I’m sure we couldn’t be in a better position to continue growing the company.”

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About Pento Pento launched in 2017, and was founded by Emil Hagbarth Rasmussen (CTO) and Jonas Bøgh Larsen (CEO). Pento lets companies automate payroll completely, by offering an easy-to-use payroll platform in the cloud. The company has more than 400 customers in Denmark, is now launching in the UK, and has raised a total of $3.5m in funding. Early investors include Futuristic.vc, Preseed Ventures, Jens Sørensen (former E-conomic CTO), Morten Wulff (GameAnalytics founder), and a handful of angels.

Read more about Pento at https://www.pento.io/

About Point Nine Capital Point Nine Capital, which was founded in 2011 by Christoph Janz and Pawel Chudzinski, is an early-stage venture capital firm primarily focused on SaaS and online marketplaces. The fund is based in Berlin, but invests all over the world. Other investments include Zendesk, Revolut, Delivery Hero, Algolia, Typeform, and Front.

About Seedcamp Seedcamp is Europe's seed fund, identifying and investing early in world-class founders attacking large, global markets and solving real problems using technology. The Seedcamp Nation includes over 300 startups building breakout businesses that change the way people live, interact and buy and includes three European unicorns: TransferWise, Revolut and UiPath along with fast-growing businesses such as wefox, Pleo, Pointy, Viz.ai and Trussle.

For more info:

Jonas Bøgh Larsen Co-founder & CEO jonas@pento.io +4530613783 https://www.pento.io

For images, logos etc: http://bit.ly/pento-press-kit