Cledara Revenue & Funding (2024)

Cledara generated an estimated $10.8M in annual revenue in 2024.

Cledara was on pace to process $500 million in gross payment volume in 2023, according to CEO Cristina Vila. The company's revenue is split between two streams: 60 percent comes from interchange fees earned through its virtual card product, and 40 percent comes from SaaS platform subscription fees. Vila confirmed the company grew five times in 2022.

Cledara had approximately 1,000 customers as of early 2023. Those customers collectively spend between $50,000 and $100,000 per month on software and range in size from 50 to 800 employees. Across all customers, the platform processes 1,500 software subscription renewals or purchases per day, with each transaction counted per customer, meaning two different customers both paying for HubSpot count as two separate transactions.

The average annual contract value for a Cledara customer was $6,000 as of 2022, based on the first US customer deal of $500 per month that Brad Van Leeuwen closed. The company acquired its first 50 US customers entirely through outreach from its London office, with no US-based employees at the time. Vila noted that the US market has a higher product bar and that customers are willing to pay more, and the company has raised prices twice in 2023 without sales-call pushback.

Cledara operates two revenue streams. The first is a subscription fee for access to its software management platform. The second is interchange revenue earned when customers use Cledara-issued virtual cards to pay for software. Vila confirmed that 60 percent of monthly revenue comes from interchange and 40 percent from SaaS subscriptions.

The interchange model works by routing customer software payments through Mastercard virtual cards issued by Cledara. The card schemes pay a percentage of each transaction to the issuer, which is Cledara, at no visible cost to the customer. In the UK and Europe the cards are debit; in the US they are credit. The host noted that a typical debit interchange ceiling in the US is approximately 2.6 percent, with a net rate after program managers of roughly 1.8 to 2 percent. Vila confirmed that Cledara negotiates to retain the majority of the interchange percentage and described the company's partner negotiations as strong given the volume involved. These interchange rate figures were stated by the host and acknowledged but not precisely confirmed by Vila as Cledara's actual rates.

Cledara works with Bond as its program manager in the US and a separate partner in the UK and Europe, integrating programmatically to create virtual cards. The company is also developing a Discover feature that recommends software vendors to customers based on usage patterns among similar companies, with a marketplace model under consideration. Vila stated the company would only recommend software based on actual usage data and would not accept paid placement. Profitability was not discussed in the interview. Gross margin, burn rate, runway, churn, LTV, CAC, and net revenue retention were not discussed.

Cledara had 80 full-time employees globally as of early 2023, up from a much smaller base. Seven of those employees were based in the United States. When the company began selling into the US market, it had zero US-based employees, and it waited until it had approximately 50 US customers before making its first American hire. The Denver office opened in September 2022 following the close of the Series A.