- Semper, a fintech that aims to help employees access their equity, has emerged from stealth mode.
- Semper has raised $4.5 million from VCs and business angels, including a cofounder of Vinted.
- Check out the 20-slide deck the French startup used to raise the fresh funds below.
A fintech that enables startup employees to sell their share options has emerged from stealth mode and raised $4.5 million in seed funding.
Semper, which was founded in France by Balthazar de Lavergne and Benjamin Kieffer, aims to make the world of secondary share transactions more transparent in Europe’s burgeoning tech ecosystem.
According to de Lavergne, granting employees access to equity is more important than ever as an increasingly-competitive hiring landscape for tech startups has driven compensation up 60% in the past three years.
Secondary transactions, which allow founders, employees, alumni, and early investors to sell a portion of their shares to existing or new investors, are usually brokered by a small number of often low-tech financial institutions who charge relatively high fees.
It’s also a time-consuming process and can take months for secondary deals to settle. The actual transactions themselves can sometimes be complex too with some investors or founders seeing it as employees having “less skin in the game,” de Lavergne told Insider.
“I’ve been working with startups and scale-ups for years helping with fundraising and in that time the leverage has shifted from investors to founders and now from founders to employees,” he told Insider in an interview.
“The secondaries market has been a very brokered, relationship-driven business in the past and to many secondary sales are glorified insider trading because of the asymmetry between price and available information.”
Generally, employees might look to sell in order to access the wealth they have accrued from working in tech in order to do things like buying a house or paying school fees.
Semper wants to offer what it calls team
liquidity
programs, which would provide a platform for companies to set rules on when said events could take place and what requirements employees need to have met in order to sell their options.
The company, which de Lavergne said is regulated in France, the UK, and the US, will then connect with investors such as family offices keen to access private markets to facilitate a transaction. Semper is hoping to do $114 million in transaction volume through 2022.
As part of its launch, the company raised funds from VC funds Seedcamp, Nordstar, Nomad Capital, FJLabs, Tiny.vc, Kima, Frst, and ByFounders alongside a high-profile list of business angels including Datadog cofounder and CTO Alexis Lê-Quôc, Vinted cofounder Justas Janauskas, Qonto cofounder Steve Anavi, and Deel CEO Alexandre Bouaziz.
Despite being based in Paris, the company wants to start operating globally and has hired a small team between France and the UK already with around 20 more staff set to join through 2022.
Semper wants to target high-growth tech startups with valuations north of $250 million and claims to have worked with two decacorn businesses already.
“Tech startups are competing on salaries and equity, every unicorn is thinking about it and most people we speak to want this to exist,” de Lavergne added. “We want to automate transactions and build out the regulatory infrastructure as we think this asset class will be regulated more as it grows.”
Check out Semper’s pitch deck below:
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