Tessellate does not exist. It was written to show what a dossier looks like. Real dossiers are never public: they are read by the investor tiers the founder picked, and by nobody else.
Tessellate
Settlement rails for cross-border B2B invoices under €50,000. Fast, thin margins, no licence of its own.
Verdict
Real product, real customers. The moat is the next job.
Tessellate works. Sixty-two companies settle invoices through it every month and volume grows 11% month on month. Demand is not the question. The question is whether Tessellate can build a moat before either of the two largest European processors ships the same feature. One of them has said it intends to. The founders know this and have a plan; section 06 says whether we believe it.
Team and why it exists
Tessellate exists because its founders ran a freight brokerage in Rotterdam and lost two suppliers over late payments. They built the first version for themselves in 2023, then found twelve other brokers with the same problem in a month.
What they have overcome: a first compliance partner that pulled out three weeks before launch, and a year of selling to accountants who did not want another tool. The accounting integrations that now bring 38% of volume came out of that year.
Three founders, fourteen people, nine of them engineers. What the team is missing is covered in section 07. What it has is unusual: every salesperson has worked in logistics.
A Series A lead with payments experience, and two or three angels who have run a regulated fintech. Not looking for a co-founder.
Product
A buyer in Ghent pays a supplier in Porto. Today that invoice takes two to four days and costs €18 to €35 in fees and FX spread. Tessellate settles it in under four minutes for a flat 0.18% and shows both parties the same status page.
The product is an API and a web dashboard. Most customers use the dashboard. The API is used by four accounting-software integrations, which together bring in 38% of volume.
Onboarding is fast. We opened an account as a Belgian sole trader and made a first payment in nine minutes. Compliance checks run in the background through a partner, and that partner’s licence is what Tessellate operates under.
There is nothing here a large processor cannot build. What Tessellate has is the status page, the accounting integrations and a sales team that only calls SMEs. That is a head start. The rest of this dossier is about turning it into a moat.
Market
The €41B figure is technically correct and commercially meaningless. Above €50k, corporates use their bank. Below it, roughly a third of SMEs already have SEPA Instant through their bank at no extra cost. What remains is €6.2B in annual volume, of which Tessellate processes €23M. At 0.18% that market is worth €11M a year in revenue to whoever wins all of it. That is the ceiling on this business as it stands.
Competition
Positioning
“The settlement layer for European SMEs.”
The fastest way for a small business to pay a small business in another eurozone country without calling the bank.
The company describes itself as "the settlement layer for European SMEs". That is too big. The honest position is a wedge. Win the accountants, own the status page, and become the thing a processor acquires rather than the thing it copies. The founders half-agree with this. Their deck does not.
Open points
Tessellate operates under a partner’s EMI licence. If that partner changes its risk appetite, the business stops the same week. An own licence application was filed on 28 August, after our draft. Until it is granted this is the single largest risk on the page.
The largest customer is 22% of monthly volume, the top five are 51%. One logistics group leaving takes a fifth of the revenue with it. Pricing power is limited while that stays true.
The status page and the accounting integrations are good products, not defensible ones. Both can be copied in two quarters by a processor that decides to. The plan is to be acquired before that happens, which is a plan but not a strategy.
Eleven months of runway against a licence process that typically takes nine to fifteen. That is tight enough that a delayed round and a delayed licence at the same time is an existential event rather than a bad quarter.
Fourteen people, nine engineers, no head of compliance. For a company applying for its own licence that gap has to close before the application is assessed, not after.
The numbers
What would move the rank
Own EMI licence. Largest customer under 15% of volume. A second accounting integration in Germany.
A processor launches sub-€50k settlement. Partner licence notice. Runway under six months without a term sheet.
Revisions
We accept the licence point and the concentration point. On the moat: our accounting integrations took eleven months to build because each one needs a certification we now hold and a competitor would have to obtain. We think that is worth more than two quarters. We filed the licence application on 28 August, before publication of this dossier and after reading the draft.
Revised 2 September 2026: added the licence filing date, corrected the largest-customer share from 19% to 22% after the July figures arrived, and reworded section 06 after the founders disputed the phrasing. The score did not change.