Paris, November 12, 2024 - Freqens has completed a €3 million pre-seed funding round with top-tier investment funds and family offices, including Seedcamp (investor in Revolut, Synthesia), Kima (Xavier Niel), Zebox (Rodolphe Saadé), Motier Ventures (Guillaume Houzé), Financière Saint James (Mickaël Benabou), and prestigious business angels like Mark Ransford, Alexandre Berriche, and Roxanne Varza.

Freqens is a Paris-based fintech company dedicated to transforming B2B purchasing practices through a cost benchmarking solution for indirect expenses (opex). By reducing the information asymmetry that often favors sellers in B2B transactions, Freqens enables buyers to instantly spot overvalued expenses and uncover significant savings opportunities.

Indirect purchases, often less controlled than direct ones, are particularly vulnerable to inflation. For instance, global indirect expenses have increased by an average of 7% per year since 2011. With rising costs across various sectors, companies are finding it increasingly challenging to anticipate and manage these fluctuations, which directly impacts their margins and profits.

Behind Freqens is a team of serial entrepreneurs and former scale-up executives, including CEO Maxime Liebens (former CSO at MakiPeople, JobTeaser), COO Richard Gozlan (former CEO of Cleanio, sold to Rocket Internet, COO of Agricool and Gopuff), and CTO Alexandre Barreira (former CPTO of Ornikar).

Even before its official launch, Freqens has already attracted several clients, including Electra, Polène, MemoBank, and Safran.ai, and has received support from purchasing experts such as Laurence Laroche (La Poste) and Florence Baiget (Veolia).

"We love this one-stop-shop for real-time cost overcharge detection and future spending assessment. This tool has definitely impacted our negotiation approach", says Martin Londe - CFO - Homa Games

"What surprises us the most is how many companies buy quickly and inefficiently. SMEs and mid-sized companies lack the resources to benchmark their conditions, and in large enterprises, negotiation activities have been deprioritized in favor of a business partner role, where buyers must satisfy all stakeholders. The digitalization of procurement has also contributed to this shift, prioritizing execution speed and control over cost performance. We’re witnessing large-scale waste, whereas, in light of sales uncertainty, cost control is more crucial than ever," explains Maxime Liebens, CEO of Freqens.

Richard Gozlan, COO, adds, “We enable companies to instantly know the right price to pay and to benchmark complex categories — a task humanly impossible to achieve in a matter of seconds. Unlike recently emerged solutions, particularly in SaaS Management, which promote outsourcing and lack neutrality as they must satisfy both buyers and sellers, we remain an independent, trusted third party. I am convinced that the key to securing the best terms is to maintain and nurture a direct supplier relationship. Our analyses reveal price variations of up to 45% for comparable scopes."

Early Support from Renowned Investors

Freqens' foundation is built on an experienced team with a track record of building high-growth companies. This team identified significant optimization opportunities in how companies evaluate their purchasing performance against the market, noting that the benchmarking process remains largely manual, time-consuming, and heavily dependent on individual skills and internal resources. This is why venture capital firms like Seedcamp and family offices such as Motier and Kima invested in this funding round.

Sia Houchangnia, Partner at Seedcamp, comments: "We were very impressed by Max, Alex, and Richard — especially their individual backgrounds and their complementarity as a founding team. We've seen several companies in the procurement/fintech space, which are often complex replacement suites. Freqens' highly targeted approach, beyond its impact, avoids disrupting an already crowded procurement tool ecosystem, bringing maximum value and a very quick deployment capability."

With the new funding, the company aims to recruit its team, invest in the development of its innovative product, and support its growth in the French and international markets.

About Freqens:

Freqens is a data platform providing market insights to help B2B buyers evaluate their current and future purchasing performance using real-time market data and peer benchmarking. By offering unique, otherwise inaccessible information, Freqens’s technology enables companies to achieve a simple yet crucial goal: buying at the right price, every time.

The company was founded by a seasoned team, including Maxime Liebens, Richard Gozlan, and Alexandre Barreira. Its investors and business angels include Seedcamp, Motier, Kima, Financière Saint James, Zebox, and influential angels like Mark Ransford, Roxanne Varza, and the founders of Voodoo, Alexandre Yazdi, and Laurent Ritter. For more information, visit Freqens website