Trustpair joins Basware, the exit of a category leader in payment fraud prevention.

Axeleo Capital — first institutional investor in Trustpair — announces the acquisition of the company by Basware, a global leader in accounts-payable and procure-to-pay automation backed by Accel-KKR. The transaction closes a partnership that began at the very first funding round and spanned every stage of the company's journey from a Paris-based startup to an international category leader.

A material, fast-moving financial risk.

Wire transfer fraud has quietly become one of the most material financial risks facing large organizations. CFOs and treasurers know the pattern — a fraudulent bank account change request slipped into a legitimate supplier thread, a single wire instruction modified at the wrong moment, and millions move out of the company in minutes. Manual verification cannot keep pace, and traditional anti-fraud tools were never designed for the procure-to-pay layer. Trustpair was built to close that gap.

From first institutional ticket to international scale-up.

Founded by Baptiste Collot, Alexandre Gillier and Simon Elcham, Trustpair developed the leading platform for automated bank account verification of third parties, covering more than 190 countries. Where a manual check takes an average of thirty minutes per supplier, Trustpair delivers an instant result for 90% of assessments — freeing finance and treasury teams for higher-value work while structurally reducing fraud exposure. The platform secures every stage of the procure-to-pay process and integrates natively with the ERP, TMS and procurement tools that anchor enterprise finance operations.

For Axeleo, the conviction started with the founders. Baptiste Collot brought a rare combination of finance domain expertise, product instinct, and the long-term operator discipline that B2B SaaS demands. The problem was real, the technology was differentiated, and the team showed from day one the seriousness required to build a global category leader.

Axeleo Capital participated in Trustpair's very first funding round and supported the founding team at every subsequent stage — product maturation, first major enterprise wins, international expansion, and a robust response to the emerging threat of AI-powered fraud. Behind that trajectory is a leadership team that has demonstrated, time and again, the ability to anticipate market shifts and adapt accordingly.

From European consolidation to transatlantic scale.

The latest signal of that conviction — Baptiste has relocated to New York to lead Trustpair's US expansion. American enterprises face an accelerating wave of AI-powered payment fraud, and the market appetite for a proven, enterprise-grade solution is significant. It is an operational commitment to winning a new market from the ground up. We have seen this pattern before with Trustpair — a deliberate decision, made at the right moment, that repositions the company ahead of the curve.

A long-term operating partnership.

Since the first institutional round, our role has gone beyond capital. We have served as a long-term operating partner to Baptiste and the executive team, providing a dedicated space for reflection on the company's organizational growth. That collaboration focused on three areas in particular.

— Scaling the leadership team — thinking through the evolution of the management layer to support international expansion.

— Strategic alignment — acting as a sounding board for Baptiste to stress-test and refine the company's trajectory.

— Human capital — sharing our experience on the organizational milestones that come with scaling from a small expert team to a global leader.

Basware — a natural home for the next stage.

Basware, headquartered in Espoo, Finland, is a global leader in accounts-payable and procure-to-pay automation, serving large enterprises across more than a hundred countries. Backed by Accel-KKR, the company has been expanding its intelligent-finance and AI capabilities and its international footprint. Combining Trustpair's third-party verification technology with Basware's procure-to-pay reach gives the platform a natural home to accelerate its category leadership — and offers Trustpair's enterprise customers fraud prevention embedded directly into the financial workflows they already run.

Why this deal matters.

Trustpair is precisely the kind of company Axeleo seeks to back — a real problem with measurable economic stakes, a differentiated technology, and a leadership team capable of building a global category leader. Wire fraud prevention is no longer a niche treasury concern; it is becoming a foundational layer of enterprise finance infrastructure, and Trustpair is in pole position to define it.

For Axeleo Capital 1, the outcome is equally significant — a strong financial result for the fund, and a clear validation of our model. It confirms our pre-seed positioning — the conviction to write the first institutional ticket, before the category is obvious — and our capacity to follow our companies through every round to exit. Backing a founder from the earliest days and staying alongside the team all the way to a strategic acquisition is exactly the trajectory Axeleo is built to run.

We are proud to have been there from the first ticket, and excited to support this next chapter.