Formance

Formance provides open-source financial infrastructure organized around a programmable, double-entry ledger for fiat and digital assets. Money movements are modeled in Numscript, the company's domain-specific language, so that transactions are atomic and multi-posting and balances remain consistent by construction. The ledger is append-only and hash-linked, with every balance reconstructable as the replayable sum of an immutable transaction log, which the company positions as an audit- and regulator-facing system of record.

Around the ledger, Formance offers additional modules: Connectivity, which standardizes access to payment service providers and banks such as Stripe, Adyen and Wise behind a single API and normalizes payments, balances and payouts into one data model; Reconciliation, which continuously compares internal ledger balances against external provider statements and surfaces drift; and Flows, which orchestrates multi-step money movement including wallets, splits, fees, holds, escrow and payouts as durable, event-driven programs. A schema builder lets teams author charts of accounts and named transactions in YAML and export them to JSON or API commands. At the time of its Series A the company offered five products and was developing a mass payout product for marketplaces intended to work across multiple providers, plus accounting exports and lower-level banking connectivity.

The platform targets use cases across digital assets (stablecoin issuers, exchanges, tokenization, custody and wallets, crypto payments and payroll), fintech (neobanks, card issuing, acquiring, lending, investing, insurance), AI (GPU and compute marketplaces, agent payments, token accounting), vertical SaaS (marketplaces, hospitality, healthcare, on-demand) and corporate treasury (international transfers, receivables, multi-entity accounting, ledger modernization).

Founding story

Formance was founded in 2021 by Clément Salaün and Anne-Sybille Pradelles. Salaün, who serves as CTO and oversees product and engineering, previously led payments at Selency, where he designed and scaled real-time systems handling multi-million transaction volumes. Pradelles, CEO, oversees go-to-market and operational functions and was previously COO at cybersecurity company Alsid, which she helped grow from inception to acquisition in four years, expanding the team beyond 120 people across the US, EMEA and APAC.

Business model

Formance sells its financial infrastructure platform to engineering teams that move money. The core ledger is MIT-licensed open source and can be self-hosted or run as a managed service, with the company stating there is no lock-in; commercial modules cover connectivity, reconciliation and flow orchestration. The company does not process payments or hold customer funds itself.

Software platform revenue from customers adopting the ledger and surrounding modules, with a managed offering alongside the self-hostable open-source core. The company reported a 10x revenue increase in the 12 months preceding January 2025.

Traction

As of the January 2025 Series A, Formance reported a 10x revenue increase over the prior 12 months and around 20 customers, of which two US customers accounted for roughly 40% of revenue. Publicly referenced deployments include Doctolib, which uses Formance as the foundation of its Financial OS, and Liberis, which reconciles across 14 countries and cites faster shipping of lending products.

Latest developments

Recent product releases include Formance Studio, which turns a plain-English product description into a validated ledger schema with accounts, transaction logic and queries tested against a live ledger, and a Formance Model Context Protocol server that allows AI agents to inspect ledger, payments and reconciliation data through a read-only boundary. The company is also promoting use cases around agentic payments, token accounting for AI workloads and stablecoin and tokenization infrastructure.