About Us
Upflow is the Financial Relationship Management platform helping B2B companies get paid faster, more predictably, and with stronger customer relationships.
Starting off with the wrong idea
In 2018, Alex set out to build a financing platform for B2B companies.
The pitch was clean: help businesses access capital faster.
He spoke with hundreds of finance teams.
And the conversations usually went the same way.
“AR financing? Maybe later. We need to first fix how we collect.”
So he dug into why collections was broken.
What he found was chaos.
The chaos
Invoices lost in email threads.
Outdated spreadsheets trying to keep track of everything.
Manual reconciliation everywhere.
Finance teams were burning hours every week just trying to figure out who owed what.
On the other side, you had customers who genuinely wanted to pay but had no easy way to do it.
But there was something even more striking.
Nobody had ever built collections with relationships in mind.
The vision was set: build a platform that fixes B2B payments on both sides of the transaction.
Start with SaaS, end in financial services.
The early days
To build something this different, you need the right partnership.
Alex met Barnaby, also an engineer, through Hexa, the startup studio behind companies like Front, Aircall, and Spendesk.
On paper, they had a lot in common. In practice, their strengths were completely different.
Alex brought deep experience in corporate finance and international business development.
Barnaby had spent years building cutting-edge consumer products as a product leader.
Alex took the CEO role, owning go-to-market and commercial strategy. Barnaby became CTPO, owning product and engineering.
From there, they brought together a small, dedicated team to build the product and take it to market.
Many of those early team members are still here, growing alongside the company.
Together, they became Upflow.
The pivot
The pieces were in place. And the search for the right market began.
Upflow launched from France, where we were based, initially selling to SMBs.
It worked, but we quickly saw a bigger opportunity overseas.
The US mid-market was where the real pain was and where we could build something that scaled.
So we went where the pain was.
That meant rethinking everything. The product, the positioning, and the go-to-market.
The bet paid off and we closed our first key logos in the US: Front, Lattice, AB Tasty.
We knew we had more to prove, but we had already built something people loved.
Series A was just the beginning
Revenue doubled. Churn dropped. Customers started referring us to their networks.
In summer 2021, we raised $15 million in Series A funding from top fintech investors.
This transformed us from a 13-person Paris-based startup into a growing team with a presence in New York and Europe.
The product evolved piece by piece.
And then in 2024, the original vision started to come to life.
We launched Upflow Payments, the first pillar of the financial services layer we’d set out to build from day one.
A payment processing platform built specifically for B2B.
For not just moving money, but creating the seamless payment experience B2B buyers expect.
We kept building.
But we found that we couldn’t answer one question along the way.
Defining the new category
People kept asking: what does Upflow do?
The answer kept getting longer.
“We automate collections without damaging relationships.
And process payments seamlessly.
And give you complete visibility into your cash flow.
And make it easier for customers to pay.
And…”
So what do you call it?
None of the existing categories fit.
Not accounts receivable software.
Not a payment processor.
Not a CRM.
Customers started describing us differently: “You manage our financial relationships.”
That’s when it clicked.
We’d already built it. We just needed to name what it was.
Financial Relationship Management.
The people building this
Today, Upflow is over 50 people across the US, Europe, and India.
Engineers who’ve built payment infrastructure at scale.
Finance operators who lived the broken processes we’re fixing.
Designers who believe B2B software doesn’t have to look like it was built in 2003.
Some joined when FRM was just an idea we couldn’t name yet.
Others came because they saw what we were building and wanted to be part of it.
All working towards the same goal: radically change how B2B payments work.
What’s next
We’re still at the beginning of the journey.
Finance teams are still fighting tools that make their jobs harder instead of easier.
Customers still want to pay but can’t find an easy way to do it.
The technology is broken. The relationships suffer for it.
We’re building the technology that fixes both.
But we’re not stopping there.
Remember that AR financing idea from 2018? The one customers said “maybe later” to?
Later is now.
Financial Relationship Management means unlocking the full value of your financial relationships.
That includes turning outstanding invoices into working capital when you need it.
We’re just getting started.
