Wavo raises €10M to free the cash SMEs bury in stock

Wavo, a Lyon fintech founded in 2024, has raised a €10M all-equity round led by Eurazeo, with Axeleo Capital and HUB612 participating, to buy more of its clients’ stock and hand SMEs back the cash they bury in inventory.

Working capital is the least glamorous problem in European tech, and one of the most expensive ones – yet it keeps producing venture rounds. Below, I lay out why this one says more about where fintech is heading than its size suggests.

An all-equity €10M for a business built against debt

Wavo announced the round on 13 October 2026: €10M, entirely in equity, led by Eurazeo. Axeleo Capital and HUB612, the Lyon-based fintech fund that hosted the company for its first two years, both participated.

The money goes where the company says it is needed: building out the technology platform, recruiting, and doubling its financing capacity – currently €200,000 to €2M per client, per its announcement. Expansion comes next, starting with Northern Europe.

It is the second round in under two years for the Lyon company, which raised €3.5M in February 2025 and has now taken in more than €13M since it started raising, per the company.

Buy at 100, sell back at 102

Wavo does not lend. It plugs into a client’s inventory management system, lets its models read stock rotation, product value and the cash cycle, then buys the inventory outright and pays immediately. The goods never move – they stay on the client’s shelves, and the client buys them back as they sell, at a premium of 2 to 5 points on the purchase price. No interest, no debt on the balance sheet.

“The more a company sells, the more stock it has to finance,” founder and CEO Julien Decherf said in the company’s announcement – the paradox every growing merchant knows. Decherf spent around a decade trading interest-rate products in investment banking before founding Wavo in 2024 with Adrien Plat, a co-founder of Indy, and Tanguy Clerget, formerly of Jellysmack. A trader’s answer to a shopkeeper’s problem, in other words.

The numbers behind the round, all per the company: around 100 businesses financed in two years, across retail, industry, mobility and energy; nearly €35M of inventory bought; roughly €100M of client sales supported; €1M in revenue reached in under a year, with a team of 16.

A $205.7bn market hiding in warehouses

Global inventory financing was worth $205.7bn in 2023 and is projected to reach $558.7bn by 2033, a 10.5% CAGR over 2024-2033 (Allied Market Research, April 2025). Europe has no reliable standalone sizing for the segment, but Eurazeo’s own framing gives the scale: inventory is “an underused asset worth several hundred billion euros in Europe,” investment director Maxime Huerre said in the announcement.

For a sense of what €10M buys at this point in the cycle, look at our own records from the past two weeks alone: Causa Prima raised a $20M seed led by Base10 Partners for AI agents that settle B2B invoices, and Finmid added €17M led by Big Pi Ventures to push embedded lending into new verticals. Wavo’s round sits squarely in that band – unlabelled, but priced like the European B2B finance rounds around it.

Working capital is becoming a venture category

So why does a company that refuses to lend need venture money? Because the constraint it attacks is structural. European SMEs sit between suppliers who want payment up front and customers who pay at 30, 60 or 90 days, and bank credit for stock is slow, collateralised and increasingly rationed. That is the reality, and it has not moved in decades.

The good news is that investors have stopped treating the cash cycle as a banking problem and started treating it as a product category. Three working-capital rounds in two weeks – invoices, embedded credit, now inventory – is a pattern, not a coincidence. And it is telling that this one comes out of Lyon, not London: HUB612 incubated Wavo for two years before writing a cheque, the kind of patient local plumbing we keep saying Europe lacks.

What to watch: whether the model’s buy-back economics hold once Wavo doubles ticket sizes, and whether Northern Europe – where inventory-heavy mid-caps are thick on the ground – takes to a French balance-sheet innovation. The whole dataset behind rounds like this lives in our fundraising data hub. Keep an eye on the warehouses – the next fintech category is sitting on their shelves.