Rivage Pulls in €2.6M to Grow Payroll Tools for Accounting Firms
Modern payroll software transforms workflow for accounting professionals.
Paris-based startup targets legacy software incumbents with AI-native platform backed by Partech and prominent angel investors.
Rivage, the Paris-based payroll software startup built for accounting firms, has closed a €2.6 million pre-seed funding round led by Partech, the venture capital firm behind early bets on Pennylane, Alan, and Epsor. The raise, which also drew angel investment from the founders of workforce platform Skello, startup studio Hexa, and accounting technology firms Quarksup and Teledec, marks the company’s first institutional capital since it was founded in July 2025. It arrives at a moment when investors are paying closer attention to the infrastructure layer beneath Europe’s professional services sector, a global payroll services market projected to reach roughly $35 billion by 2030 at a compound annual growth rate of around 4.5%.
The opportunity in France is specific and structural. More than half of all employees in the country depend on accounting firms or outsourcing providers for their payroll and social security declarations. The software coordinating those flows sits at the centre of a vast market, yet remains controlled by aging systems architected for a pre-cloud era. Payroll managers at accounting firms routinely spend six to seven hours a day inside these tools, contending with rigid interfaces, limited interoperability, and a regulatory environment that grows more complex with every legislative session. For a growing number of firms, the friction has become a strategic liability.
That is the gap Rivage is built to close. The company has developed an open, interoperable payroll platform designed to increase the productivity of payroll managers while repositioning payroll data as a lever for broader human resources advisory services. The platform is already live across eight partner accounting firms and covers 40 national collective agreements, the regulatory frameworks governing employment conditions across French industries. The company aims to reach 150 agreements by the end of 2026, a threshold covering more than 90% of the French workforce.
“Payroll has become a major pain point for firms,” said Tancrède d’Hauteville, co-founder and chief executive of Rivage. “Between the increasing complexity of regulatory frameworks, the accelerating digitalization of small businesses, and the monopoly imposed by legacy solutions, the status quo is unsustainable. We built this with our accounting partners from day one so they can break free from that dependence.”
The founding team brings together two complementary pairs. Ayoub Saidane and Paul Lemoine, graduates of École Polytechnique and CentraleSupélec respectively, lead engineering. HEC graduates Hector Vergeron and d’Hauteville run commercial strategy and go-to-market. All four are in their twenties, a profile that initially drew scepticism but that Partech came to view as an advantage. Before writing production code, the team conducted conversations with more than 100 accounting firms, payroll professionals, legacy vendors, and emerging competitors, assembling a granular map of where previous attempts to modernize French payroll had stalled. “We have rarely seen customer research this deep at such an early stage,” Partech wrote in a public statement on the investment.
That research shaped a clear competitive thesis. The incumbent that dominates the accounting firm segment is Silae, a legacy provider whose platform has served the market for years. Rivage argues that Silae’s product has become too broad and rigid for the needs of modern firms, though the incumbent retains significant market share and deep client relationships that will not be easy to displace. Rivage’s architecture takes a different path entirely. The platform is modular and interoperable from the ground up, designed to integrate with HRIS tools, accounting systems, and the wider stack of business software that firms and their SME clients use daily. The company describes its approach as AI-native, with machine learning embedded in the core architecture to automate the most repetitive stages of the payroll cycle, from DSN (Déclaration Sociale Nominative) calculations to the interpretation of collective agreement rules.
The distinction between Rivage and better-known payroll disruptors is worth noting. PayFit, the French startup that reached unicorn status on the strength of its HR and payroll offering, built its product for SMEs directly, handling payroll processing in-house. Rivage is targeting the other side of the market: the accounting firms that act as outsourced payroll providers for millions of French workers. It is a fundamentally different distribution model. A single accounting firm client can represent hundreds or thousands of underlying employees across multiple businesses, which gives the channel concentrated leverage but also demands a product that can absorb far greater regulatory and operational complexity than a direct-to-SME tool.
The newly raised capital will fund two priorities. The first is continued platform development, with a focus on deeper HRIS connectivity, simplified advanced configuration, and enhanced auditability of payroll and DSN calculations, capabilities that carry real weight in an environment where processing errors translate directly into financial penalties. The second is the expansion of collective agreement coverage, alongside plans to deliver more than 10 integrations with the broader HR and accounting technology ecosystem by year-end.
For Partech, the bet extends a thesis that has already paid off once. The firm’s early backing of Pennylane, which went on to reshape cloud accounting for French firms, demonstrated that entrenched incumbents in the accounting technology stack can be unseated when a modern product meets a structural shift in demand. Whether that pattern repeats in payroll remains to be seen. France’s regulatory density makes the market both harder to penetrate and more defensible once a foothold is secured, but it also raises the execution bar considerably. Scaling collective agreement coverage, maintaining compliance accuracy at speed, and convincing risk-averse firms to migrate away from familiar tools are challenges that have tripped up well-funded predecessors.
With eight firms in production and a roadmap that would bring its agreement coverage to more than 90% of the workforce within the year, Rivage has moved beyond concept stage. The test now is whether the company can scale fast enough to convert early traction into durable market position before incumbents adapt or new entrants close the window.
