Our Investment in Bling
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital, Fintech, Investing, Technology

We are extremely proud to announce our partnership with Pierre-Eloi and Ben, the co-founders of Bling. For those who haven’t heard of the Company just yet: Bling is the financial platform for the 33% of Europeans living paycheck-to-paycheck. They are critically underserved by incumbents and neo-banks alike, primarily because they are perceived as unprofitable customers. Bling’s first product is an instantaneous cash advance (we’re not talking “same-day” but truly instantaneous), powered by automated cashflow underwriting. Bling is currently live in France but may have bigger plans 🤐.

From the outside, understanding why an investor built enough conviction to invest in a particular company and not another can seem arbitrary and mysterious. As investors, we also spend a lot of time trying to unpack why we lean a particular way about an opportunity.

The truth is that we all come to an investment decision with the benefit of our own experiences — personal and professional — which in turn lead to (positive and negative) preconceptions about the opportunity as a whole. Our job as venture investors is to recognize these pre-conceptions, identify the reasons underpinning them and to diligently try to disprove them.

Looking back at our decision to partner with Pierre-Eloi, Ben, and the rest of the Bling team, how did the process unfold?

Our Initial Excitement🤩

From the outset, two experiences made us understand what the team was working on instinctively:

First, my personal experience with the pain point : growing up, cash was tight — very tight sometimes. I don’t think we were “poor”; we were just just structurally in a rocky financial situation, for a combination of professional and personal reasons. Because of that, routine topics of conversations at home included: overdraft fees, more serious issues with the bank, and figuring out what we could put in our grocery basket towards the end of the month. I also know the psychological toll involved in asking family or employers for help. No surprise then that I instinctively understood that €100, €50, or €25 can make a very real difference for a lot of people (over 1/3rd of Europeans, in fact).

: growing up, cash was tight — very tight sometimes. I don’t think we were “poor”; we were just just structurally in a rocky financial situation, for a combination of professional and personal reasons. Because of that, routine topics of conversations at home included: overdraft fees, more serious issues with the bank, and figuring out what we could put in our grocery basket towards the end of the month. I also know the psychological toll involved in asking family or employers for help. No surprise then that I instinctively understood that €100, €50, or €25 can make a very real difference for a lot of people (over 1/3rd of Europeans, in fact). Second, Secocha’s exposure to a similar company in the US: our firm has been fortunate enough to have had front row seats to the exceptional growth of a company with a similar mission in the US. As investors in Brigit, we have seen Zuben and Hamel build an incredible product improving the financial lives of tens of thousands of Americans. Witnessing Brigit’s impact and success first-hand — and understanding the philosophy that allowed the founders deliver so much in record time — was incredibly powerful.

Yeah…we were pretty excited.

Disproving our Initial Excitement 🧐

Our initial excitement was just the beginning of the story. Our decision couldn’t be driven by our pre-conceptions. Pierre-Eloi will tell you that we tried hard to disprove our initial excitement. Over a period of a few weeks, we spoke with him and Ben multiple times, some of their team members, and some of their early investors. We also carried out our own market research.

With every conversation, our conviction strengthened. Not because the data spoke for itself (it rarely does at that stage) but because we could see a team moved by a powerful drive to change lives, backed up by one of the strongest work ethics I’ve seen and a insatiable desire to improve as entrepreneurs.

We could also see in them a rare combination of founder-market-fit and founder-product-fit, which had already allowed to put together the most sophisticated product in the market and was leading them to build a powerful brand around it.

Happy Beginnings! 🤑

We now stand a few months after the investment and it’s of course too early to say if Bling will be the standout success that we all hope. What I can say, though, is that it’s been a very very very promising start and that Pierre-Eloi and Ben have been a delight to work with!

🚀