Hyperline raises an additional $10m in seed investment to open new chapter in revenue management

Before launching Lokki to help people rent sports equipment like skis and surfboards, co-founder Raphaël Masbou didn’t think too much about processing customer payments. But as the company found success, the realities of running a modern SaaS company soon kicked in. With over 1,500 customers on a myriad of custom and flexible pricing plans, and a need to regularly iterate pricing, Lokki’s small dev team soon had to add two extra payment tools.

The increasingly fragmented setup led to payment errors, missed invoices and reporting problems. “The company was still young, and I was already creating a billing monster…We were leaving money on the table each month, and it couldn’t continue”, explains Raphaël. So, he went on the hunt for a better way of billing, which led him to Hyperline.

Within weeks, every Lokki customer – no matter how complex the deal structure – was migrated to Hyperline. With no code needed or support from the Hyperline team, the system was soon up and running, seamlessly integrating with every part of the company’s workflow, from accounting to CRM. Now, sales and customer success teams can set up new custom deals or change pricing anytime – without engineering support or disrupting existing customer plans. The team has also been empowered by data to trial new pricing models such as usage-based.

“Businesses need more flexibility to price each product they offer differently, and in new ways. People are tired of subscriptions. They're tired of paying set prices for set functionality. It’s why founders who might be using subscriptions today want the peace of mind that they can evolve their business and pricing model without changing their sales process, tech, or even the product itself.” – Lucas Bédout, Hyperline co-founder and CEO

Future-Proofed Billing in the AI era

Lokki’s story highlights that as customer expectations for bespoke pricing grow, straightforward recurring SaaS subscriptions are no longer cutting it. Additionally, the increasing prevalence of AI pricing models (involving rapid usage growth and automation demands) make a uniform monthly pricing model impractical for many emerging companies. It’s why business offer highly customized deals alongside exploring new ways to price their software – whether fully bespoke, support-based, pay-as-you-go, pay-per-result or hybrid models.

While recurring subscriptions aren’t dead yet, the space is evolving quickly with rigid legacy payment solutions unable to handle increased complexity. Hyperline, on the other hand, is built for flexibility. Never assuming that billing will be made for a fixed price on a set date, it supports hybrid solutions and can run countless pricing models simultaneously. As we enter a new stage in how products are paid for, Hyperline enables companies to react immediately while also futureproofing their billing. That’s why we’re doubling down on Hyperline, leading an additional $10m of seed funding, bringing the company’s total seed funding raised to more than $14m.

Strong early traction as team digs into market opportunity

In the 18 months since we first invested, the startup has grown its client base more than 20-fold, expanding from a few passionate early adopters to serving more than 150 small and medium-sized software and tech companies generating up to $100m ARR. Powering businesses such as Infinit, Veesion, Gladia, Qobra, Ocus, and ScorePlay, it is compatible with every currency and business model, and offers global billing capabilities.

Hyperline’s co-founder and CEO Lucas Bédout explains that the product’s appeal lies not only in its pricing flexibility and workflow integrations but also in his company’s mission to enable businesses to maximise revenue. Having previously spent five years as a tennis coach, Lucas focused on helping his customers make the most of the skills they already have – a mindset he’s brought to building Hyperline.

“We are trying to help you extract the most out of what a business already has,” Lucas tells me. “You probably have multiple products that you can leverage a lot more than you currently do. You could price that add-on. You could add a new pricing model to appeal to a wider customer base. You could add elements of usage-based pricing. You could increase billing by tweaking the pricing model of X or Y product.”

A vision for context-rich revenue management

In the long term, Hyperline will increasingly enable companies to make the most out of what they have by capturing value from money movement and contextual data. Having already grown from a flexible, highly customisable subscription payment platform into a complete solution that offers seamless workflows, powerful automation, and a comprehensive ecosystem of integrations, Hyperline is now enabling data-driven pricing and billing. This ensures customers get real value, while providers monetize their products fully.

“By linking the data between payments, product and usage, we can help businesses understand how customers use their products. In the long term, we’re going to unlock insights and automations that were previously only available to the most advanced tech businesses,” explains Lucas.

While subscription payment providers drove the first phase of cloud-based SaaS, Hyperline is set to unlock the next era of billing and payments – one that’s data-driven, AI-powered, attractive to customers, and helps product providers stop leaving money on the table.