Our Investment in Linc

We are thrilled to announce our new investment in Linc, a seed stage AI-native payroll engine built for payroll experts in France. The round includes existing investors Headline and Resonance, alongside Founders Future and other notable investors and angels.

Payroll is a mission-critical system that remains largely untouched by modern software. Linc is rebuilding this layer from first principles in one of the most complex markets globally.

The Problem

French payroll is at a breaking point. It is governed by overlapping layers of law, ~800 collective agreements, and company-specific rules that change frequently, often retroactively. Despite this complexity, payroll bureaus still operate on legacy, black-box software with limited transparency and heavy manual workflows, capping productivity at ~200–400 payslips per expert. The dominant incumbent, Silae, is now raising prices while under-investing in product, leaving payroll firms squeezed and actively searching for alternatives, without a credible solution available until now.

The Solution

Linc is building a transparent, rules-based payroll engine designed for how payroll experts actually work. By exposing every calculation and encoding complex regulatory logic directly into the system, it replaces the opacity of legacy tools. Combined with AI-driven rule ingestion and anomaly detection, Linc enables materially higher productivity, targeting 2–3x more payslips per expert. Distributed through payroll bureaus, the product follows a land-and-expand motion, embedding deeply within workflows and increasing share of wallet over time. This is core infrastructure, not a layer on top.

The Team Behind It

The founders, Baptiste and Thomas, ex-PayFit, where they scaled the French business from early traction to tens of millions in ARR. They combine deep payroll expertise with proven go-to-market execution and have built a product-heavy team focused on solving one of the hardest technical problems in enterprise software.

Why Now

The market is turning. A legacy incumbent is extracting value rather than innovating, customers are actively looking to switch, and recent advances in AI make it possible to solve payroll complexity at the engine level for the first time. This aligns directly with our WorkTech thesis: critical back-office functions are being rebuilt as software takes on increasingly complex workflows. Linc is building foundational infrastructure in a high-value, winner-takes-most market.

Congratulations to the Linc team. Learn more about the announcement here. You can check out their press coverage on TFN and Maddyness and more on our investment on Thomas’ Substack here.