Company: Husk

Founders: Christophe Sion / Georgy Taranov

Headquarters: Brussels, Belgium

Most Recent Valuation: €5.2m, February 2025

Employees: 7

Founded: 2024

In One Sentence: “Husk optimizes and manages all spending for European startups.”

Top quote: “Credit fuels the whole world’s economy, but those shaping the future don't have access to it; they don't fit into it. At Husk, we believe that such access should be granted.”

Who are you building your product/service for, and what painful problem are you taking away from their day?

(Answers provided by Christophe) We’re building for startups. Cash is the oxygen of a startup, but as costs grow, managing cash and optimizing spend becomes critical. Founders are left with broken, siloed tools. They don't fit into traditional financial frameworks.

Banks don't provide working capital to these companies, are not flexible, and don’t interact well with a startup's finance stack. Expense tools are complex and siloed, and Excel is prone to mistakes. As a founder, you don’t have the time or skills of a CFO to handle this all.

The financial stack that founders have access to does not optimize their cash flows. For example, prepaid cards and debit cards immediately block a startup's money, its working capital. This problem comes with the following associated costs:

If a top-tier VC is reading this, what would you want them to understand about your company in 30 seconds?

Husk can be the first financial operator in any company, and is the financial operating system at any scale of such company. With such growth, the value add of Husk keeps growing. We already see this translated in how we grow. We don't only grow in number of customers, but also aggressively in contractual value with each customer.

What are you doing differently than your competitors?

At Husk, our solution, from onboarding to usage, is instantly available and self-managed, reducing the time to access a complete finance stack from weeks to minutes. Most startups target an 18-24 month runway. Our insights show founders exactly where they stand in that journey, helping them make better decisions.

With 30-day payment terms, cashback, and spending insights, customers typically achieve 5% spend savings. Unlike competitors with debit and prepaid cards that lock up your capital, we free up working capital. Competitors require you to transfer money to use their cards, while we offer flexible repayment terms. Founders can give employees controlled financial freedom through cards with preset limits. This dramatically reduces administrative work. We are saving founders more than 5× the time they would normally spend on financial tasks.

We also reduce complexity for founders. For example, our expense management feature runs via WhatsApp. It's simple, everyone already uses Whatsapp, and there are no adoption issues.

How did you meet, and why have you partnered with each other on this business?

We were both exploring ideas in the same space. My cofounder Georgy (CTO) was exploring builds for risk models 'as a service', and I was exploring trends for managing and optimizing finance and spending. I was doing this as a non-technical person, but with a background as a banking and finance lawyer.

It was two 'single' founders at that moment, each with an idea. I looked into participating in Techstars, more specifically into their fintech program in Amsterdam, and they liked where I was getting with the idea but weren’t keen on single founders. However, Amsterdam is a thriving ecosystem, so I went there for a few months and met Georgy at a Techstars event. He had been a participant in the Antler program just before we met.

Fortunately, our skills are very complimentary and our initial focus areas were extremely complimentary. Then we got to know each other and figured out that working together could work out.

Fun fact. We later applied as a cofounding team to Techstars and got in.

What was the “this has to exist” moment that made you start the company?

In my previous job I was a banking and finance lawyer, structuring and optimizing the finances of large corporates. They had large internal finance teams to manage it all and had access to capital, working capital, and loans to optimize it. That combination gives these large corporates an enormous financial advantage and edge. Even though they are profitable, they optimize themselves with credit.

Startups, on the other hand, tend to grow fast and shape the economy of tomorrow. However, they lack access to an optimized and perfectly managed finance stack, and to a dedicated finance team. Financial tools are siloed and none of them handle the extremely important aspect of not only managing/visualizing your finances, but also optimizing it. Rethinking and developing a single platform was the only way to really get these companies financially optimized. And that, of course, increases growth possibilities.

In short, credit fuels the whole world’s economy, but those shaping the future don't have access to it; they don't fit into it. At Husk, we believe that such access should be granted.

How do you make money? Which part of your business model are you most excited about scaling?

Our business model is two-fold:

1) Interchange fees on the card transactions

2) Subscription fees for the platform.

We are especially excited about expanding the first part, the interchange fees. It's a model that works perfectly with our target audience that actually allows us to run a business, create revenue, and fully optimize the finances of our customers. Hence, it's 100% aligned with our goal to make our customers financially efficient. These fees are not paid by our customers, but are paid by the merchants to us. For example, by Google, Notion, Meta etc.

Which proof points matter most right now?

Husk itself is a startup. We managed to bring this product to the market, in a regulated market, and closed great partnerships including one with Mastercard. We also raised our pre-seed funding round. At this moment, we are in the growth phase and full attention goes to that. Growing our customer base and revenue is the most important. In the last few months of 2025 alone, we grew 3X.

How does your product/service make the world a better place?

It's not about being faster, cheaper or more convenient alone. With Husk, it's about opening access to a set of tools, financial tools in our case, to a market segment that hardly had access to it before and was unable to optimize itself financially.

Very specifically. We help these companies extend their runway, and as a result of becoming more efficient they increase their growth potential. This happens because we take over as much of the burden of finance as possible, and turn it into an accelerator instead of something dragging the company.

As our customers are the companies creating new businesses and economies, we want to be their financial partner all along their growth trajectory.

What’s been your biggest unexpected challenge so far, and what did it force you to learn quickly?

We track everything, and even the smallest things really matter. Tracking allows us to start seeing trends and patterns, and to see how customers use our products.

For example, the momentum for card payments is extremely short. When you pay with your card, it needs to work. If it doesn't work instantly the momentum is gone - A customer will be frustrated and try to pay in another way. In the worst case, they may even try to pay with a personal card instead of a company card. However, when a decline happens we immediately let the customer know over Whatsapp that it was declined; but more importantly, why it was declined. Often it's because of a limit that they put on themselves beforehand.

What does success look like in 12 months? What about in 5 years?

In 12 months it’s very simple: serving 500 customers across Europe

In 5 years: looking back on our data of startups and clearly being able to show that we improved their financial efficiency and directly contributed to their growth. That would be achieving our mission.

What type of partner or collaborator would most accelerate your journey right now? (If relevant, which roles are you hiring for?)

We’ve already found some major and great partners, including Techstars who were the first ones to believe in us. At the moment it's all about growth of the company, so we are always looking for people to strengthen that, to accelerate and increase our sales and growth even more. Our doors are always open for very talented people to join the team.

Finish this sentence: “We’ll know we’ve really made it when…”

We’re referred to as the ‘go-to’ finance tool within the European startup world.

Website: www.usehusk.com

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