Translucent, the Accounting & Financial Management Platform for Multinational Businesses, Raises £2.7M From LocalGlobe
Translucent, the accounting platform solving the everyday finance problems of multi-entity businesses, has raised a £2.7M pre-seed round led by London-based VC firm LocalGlobe, Europe’s number one seed investor and backers of Wise, Zoopla and Improbable.
Several prominent angel investors also participated, including Co-founder and former CTO of Xero Craig Walker and Co-founder and former Managing Director of Xero UK, Gary Turner, who have both joined Translucent’s board of directors, as well as founders from fintech and accounting-tech leaders, such as GoCardless, Jeeves, Karbon, Libeo, ComplyAdvantage, Ignition, Hubdoc and KashFlow.
Translucent was founded in 2022 in London by CEO Michael Wood, a respected leader in the world of accounting technology, who co-founded Dext, (formerly Receipt Bank), which was acquired by leading software investor Hg in 2021 for several hundred million GBP. Dext is used by over 10,000 accounting firms around the world, with more than 1 million users.
Translucent enables multi-entity businesses to unify their financial data and workflows by layering on top of existing accounting software, such as Xero, Quickbooks and Sage.
Next-Generation Accounting in a ‘Default Global’ World
Current SMB accounting systems are designed to hold the data of a single company in a single location, but businesses that operate multi-nationally, or have multiple entities, often end up with fragmented, siloed, and messy data, creating systemic issues.
Over the past two decades, globalisation, offshoring and the reach of the internet has meant that companies have needed to, and been able to, become multinational earlier than ever before. The impact of COVID-19 has dramatically accelerated this trend, as outlined by Andreessen Horowitz’s ‘Default Global’ thesis. However, this trend has caused numerous difficulties for finance teams as accounting software systems have not kept up, with businesses forced to use either enterprise-level solutions or a patchwork of different SMB systems.
Translucent offers a solution for multinational and multi-entity accounting that unifies financial data into a single location where it can be seen, used and edited. The company aims to become the platform for running, managing or advising multiple iterations of accounting software.
A New Financial System of Record
Translucent integrates with existing compliance solutions, stores all the data in a single place, harmonises the data, and provides the toolset to enable collaboration around the data. Functions include group reporting, bookkeeping, audit and procurement.
Michael Wood, Founder and CEO of Translucent, comments: “Xero, and others, have transformed accounting for single entity businesses, but from my own experience, I know the problems that multi-entity businesses face. Translucent will enable businesses to consolidate their multiple entities, and the software attached to each, to create a single system of record. We are thrilled to have the backing of LocalGlobe and so many notable Angels to turn Translucent into a global company.”
Remus Brett at LocalGlobe VC comments: “Michael has already built one of the leading cloud accounting solutions in Dext, we think the opportunity with Translucent is to build something even bigger!”
Since launching, Translucent has since expanded its team to 16 people, including Ju-Vern See, co-founder of Quantico, as Head of Operations, and Stef Lewandowski, former Head of Engineering at Oak National Academy, as Chief Technical Officer (CTO). Translucent’s team is spread across Europe, including the UK, Norway, The Netherlands, Portugal and Slovenia.
