The Norwegian group Visma, valued at over EUR 8 billion, enters the SmartBill shareholding, taking over half of the company. The founders, Ioana Hasan, Radu Hasan, and Mircea Capatină, will maintain control, continuing to develop the business, while the value of the transaction was not made public.

SmartBill has multiplied its business 5 times in the last 4 years, with annual increases of 50 percent, being the market leader in financial and accounting solutions in Romania. Visma’s shareholding will facilitate the maintenance of the accelerated growth rate and the development of the SmartBill ecosystem, meant to improve the activity of SMEs in Romania.

“We found in Visma the ideal partner to move SmartBill to the next level. Their resources and experience will help us to make SmartBill even better, to continue to innovate and make Romanian entrepreneurs’ lives a little easier. I am very proud of why SmartBill has arrived and I want to thank my co-founders, Ioana and Mircea, our investors, but especially the excellent team we have created, which has played the most important role in our development in recent years. This transaction is also a confirmation of the fact that our mission to become the first software ecosystem for SMEs in Romania is about to be fulfilled, but also that our billing, management and accounting solutions in the cloud are at the level we we want it. Last but not least, I would like to thank our customers, without them we would not have arrived here. We have a lot of pleasant surprises for them in the near future, this is the perfect time to be part of the SmartBill ecosystem,” said Radu Hasan, Co-Founder & CEO, about the transaction and SmartBill’s future plans.

This new acquisition is in line with Visma’s strategy to produce and deliver the best cloud solutions for the management and management of small and medium-sized businesses in northern and central and eastern Europe. SmartBill is a suite of cloud applications of the highest quality, reliability, and ease of use, exactly what Visma is looking for in the Romanian market.

“Visma’s mission is to help companies and organizations improve their productivity and provide a better approach to digitizing, integrating and automating business processes. By joining SmartBill, Visma will provide a powerful brand, the experience of a market leader in the cloud and development resources segment. SmartBill will also help strengthen a new market for Visma Group,” said Jostein Håvaldsrud, Product Director, Visma Group

SmartBill is the first business software ecosystem in Romania, with the main objective of process automation, data transfer, as well as the issuance of documents, thus eliminating the manual, redundant, data re-entry work in various systems. An eloquent example would be: the information of an order from an online store reaches the balance sheet of both parties, without having to be re-entered manually in other systems. In addition, the processing of bank statements and logos from the courier companies leads to further automation. The scenarios can be numerous and varied, SmartBill addressing any type of business.

“We invested in the excellent entrepreneurial team from SmartBill in 2016 and we are pleased to see that the business has grown more than 5 times since the time of the investment and that a very large European company, strategic in the field of software and technology applications as a Service, decided to invest in the market leader in Romania, SmartBill!” said Marius Ghenea, Managing Partner Catalyst Romania

SmartBill services are currently used by over 65,000 customers, from PFAs, to small and medium-sized companies, and to multinationals, from all business sectors, such as services and commerce. Over 2 million documents are issued monthly through the platform, and their value exceeds 4 billion euros per year.

The transaction was assisted by the law firms RTPR & Allen & Overy and Wolf Theiss and is currently in the process of approval by the Romanian authorities.