Pleo

Pleo ended Q4 2025 at roughly €164M ARR, the result of a 65% CAGR from 2020 to 2025. FY2024 revenue rose 37%, with SaaS subscription revenue up 56%. Card interchange still drives about 70% of revenue. Subscriptions are the other 30%. The customer base passed 40,000 European businesses, up from around 33,000 in mid-2024.

The May 2024 $42.7M Series C extension is still the last priced round. Kinnevik’s Q4 2025 mark on its ~13% stake implies an internal valuation around SEK 14.4B, roughly $1.3B. That is well below the December 2021 $4.7B unicorn peak, which is the honest read on where the European fintech category sits today.

The other 2025 story was a 100-person layoff in September–November, concentrated in commercial and SMB-facing roles, especially in the UK. Pleo framed it as a go-to-market reshuffle to redeploy spend into product and GTM tech. That is the corporate way of saying the old direct-sell motion was not paying back fast enough.

What replaces it is Pleo Embedded, launched September 2025 with Mastercard. The product white-labels Pleo’s spend-management infrastructure for banks and fintechs to push to their own SMB customers. A treasury and money-market account built with lemon.markets in Germany rounded out the year.

Pleo is no longer just a card-and-app company. It is positioning as the infrastructure layer competing for the SMB book that European banks have been losing for a decade. That repositioning makes the layoff cleaner to read in hindsight: direct sales to SMBs is a high-cost motion, and licensing the rails to incumbent banks is a different P&L. The directory now lists Pleo alongside Lunar as the two Copenhagen-led examples of fintechs that picked profitability over growth in the same 12 months.