The open-source, programmable ledger that lets developers move money without fighting their own plumbing.
Above: the Formance mark - a company that stays next to the money, never on top of it.
Every company that moves money eventually builds a ledger. It starts as a database table, grows into a tangle of custom code, and ends as the most fragile system in the business - the one nobody sees until it is off by a cent. Formance was built to end that cycle. It offers a programmable core ledger, open-sourced and self-hostable, that records every asset movement with double-entry precision and treats reconciliation as a feature rather than a second job.
Founded in 2021 by Clement Salaun and Anne-Sybille Pradelles, Formance sits underneath fintech applications rather than in front of them. It does not process payments or hold customer funds. Instead it tracks, orchestrates, and reconciles money as it flows across banks, payment rails, wallets, and exchanges. The company frames the problem plainly in its own tagline: "Stop fighting your ledger."
That positioning drew PayPal Ventures and Portage, who co-led a $21 million Series A in January 2025, with Y Combinator, Hoxton Ventures, and Axeleo Capital joining. The round followed a reported tenfold jump in revenue over the prior twelve months and a plan to grow the team toward 50 people while expanding a New York go-to-market presence.
"Stop fighting your ledger."
Formance is modular by design. Teams can adopt the open-source ledger alone or layer on connectivity, workflow automation, and reconciliation as their money movement grows more complex.
An open-source, programmable core ledger that models transactions and tracks balances with atomic, double-entry precision. Deployable to your own cloud.
A domain-specific language that describes money movement in plain, machine-safe terms - replacing brittle custom transaction code with declarative scripts.
A single API that unifies banks, payment rails, wallets, and exchanges into one consistent data format through payment connectors.
Automates complex fund-lifecycle workflows - holds, KYC checks, payment initiation, and payouts - across multiple providers.
Automatically matches internal ledger records against external statements to catch discrepancies in real time.
send [USD/2 100] ( source = @world destination = @users:alice:wallet )
A Numscript snippet - money movement expressed as readable intent: move value from a source to a destination, atomically.
Fintechs juggle multiple bank accounts, processors, and wallets, each with its own format and its own truth. Homegrown ledgers drift, reconciliation eats engineering hours, and auditors ask a question that is hard to answer: can you prove where the money went? Formance makes that answer atomic and auditable.
Fintechs, platforms, and enterprises that move money at scale - roughly 20-plus customers at Series A, including Doctolib, Liberis, Shares, Booksy, Stables, Bastion, Getmomo, and Payflip. Two U.S. customers reportedly drove about 40% of revenue around the raise.
Unlike Stripe and similar processors, Formance never touches or holds customer funds - it stays vendor-agnostic middleware. And unlike closed infrastructure, its core is open source and self-hostable, so teams keep control of their most sensitive system.
Formance is part of the "AWS-for-fintech" wave of modular money-movement infrastructure. Alternatives include building in-house or adopting players like Modern Treasury, Fragment, TigerBeetle, and Increase. Its edge is openness plus regulatory-grade auditability.
Formance has raised roughly $30.9M to date. Its $21M Series A - the largest chunk - was co-led by PayPal Ventures and Portage in January 2025.
"We're going to continue to modularize the whole stack."
Formance runs an open-core model. The ledger and Numscript are free and self-hostable; revenue comes from managed cloud hosting, enterprise modules for connectivity, flows, and reconciliation, plus support and compliance-grade features. By staying out of the money flow - never processing payments, never holding funds - Formance sidesteps the regulatory weight that constrains full-service providers and keeps its footprint deliberately vendor-agnostic.
The expertise runs deep on the systems side. The core ledger is written in Go and engineered for atomic, race-free transactions - the kind of guarantee that sounds mundane until a partial write leaves two customers with claims on the same dollar. The team pairs that engineering rigor with financial-operations experience: one co-founder led payments at a marketplace, the other ran operations at a cybersecurity startup. Both had lived the pain of money moving through software and going quietly wrong.
Clement Salaun and Anne-Sybille Pradelles start Formance in Paris and open-source the programmable core ledger and Numscript.
Payment connectors and a unified API arrive to integrate banks, rails, wallets, and exchanges.
The stack expands into automated fund-lifecycle workflows and real-time reconciliation.
Adoption by fintechs like Doctolib, Liberis, and Shares drives a tenfold revenue increase over twelve months.
PayPal Ventures and Portage co-lead the round; Formance headquarters in New York and grows toward 50 people.
It provides open-source financial infrastructure - a programmable core ledger plus connectivity, flows, and reconciliation modules - so developers can build money-moving applications without building the plumbing themselves.
No. Formance is deliberately vendor-agnostic middleware; it tracks and orchestrates money movement but never touches or holds customer funds, which keeps it independent of payment rails.
Yes. Its core ledger (written in Go) and the Numscript language are open source and self-hostable, with commercial managed hosting and enterprise modules on top.
Its $21M Series A (January 2025) was co-led by PayPal Ventures and Portage, with participation from Y Combinator, Hoxton Ventures, and Axeleo Capital. Total funding is roughly $30.9M.
Fintechs and platforms that move money at scale, including Doctolib, Liberis, Shares, Booksy, Stables, Bastion, Getmomo, and Payflip - around 20-plus customers at the time of its Series A.