Wavo raises €10M to turn SME inventory into working capital without debt

Wavo (Lyon) has raised a €10 million round led by Eurazeo. Axeleo Capital and HUB612 co-invest. The round is the company's first formal outside equity financing since a €3.5M seed in February 2025. No stage label was applied. The company was founded in 2024.

The model

Wavo finances SME inventory directly — not the invoices that follow a sale, but the stock in the warehouse before any sale has occurred. The mechanism: Wavo buys unsold inventory at agreed prices and holds it on its own balance sheet, releasing cash to the SME immediately. As the client's goods move through their sales channels, Wavo sells the inventory back. No interest. No debt on the SME's books. No personal guarantee required.

The target client is a French SME managing between €200,000 and €2 million of inventory at a time — a bracket too large for a personal credit card, too small to be interesting to most asset-based lenders, and too inventory-heavy for invoice factoring to solve. The product bridges a structural gap in French SME finance that banks have not addressed, in part because the underwriting requires real-time visibility into product lines, sales velocity, and liquidation risk that traditional credit models cannot efficiently process.

The traction behind the round

At the time of closing, Wavo had approximately 100 clients, had financed around €35 million of inventory linked to approximately €100 million of client sales, and reported roughly €1 million in revenue. The team counts 16 to 18 people.

Eurazeo's entry as lead investor marks the transition from an early-adopter customer base to institutional capital. The firm, one of France's largest listed private equity and venture investors, does not typically lead rounds at this scale unless commercial fundamentals are clear.

What the round funds

The €10 million will expand Wavo's financing capacity, grow the team, and support market entry in Northern Europe — a region where inventory-intensive SMEs face similar working-capital constraints but different credit market structures. The company has not disclosed which Northern European countries are targeted first.