WeLink raises 1.5 million euros to become the "Doctolib" of the liberal professions

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WeLink announced on January 29, 2020 a 1.5 million euros round of funding from Takara Capital and business angels. This start-up specialized in marketing, currently present in 6 European countries – France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland and United Kingdom – plans for 2020 an expansion across the Atlantic to Brazil and in Canada. It also wishes to develop on six vertical news, which WeLink wishes to keep confidential, while specifying that "they will always concern the independent and liberal professions".

The company also wants to quickly operate a new round of fundraising in series A, scheduled for June 2020. "These fundraisers will make it possible to develop visibility and sales tools that the liberal professions and the self-employed need to transform themselves, such as making appointments, online consultation, global referencing and lead management…", lists Charles Passereau, co-founder and CEO of WeLink.

Match demand and supply

Launched in 2018 by Charles Passereau and Kevin Goncalves, the start-up was born from a simple observation: "Many liberal professions and freelancers are not lucky enough to have found their Doctolib and do not yet have the solution to find their clients on the Internet", explain the founders. The start-up specializes in the industrialization of interfaces between independent professionals and customers via an algorithm that finds matches between demand and available supply.

The search engine is intended to be intuitive in order to allow a fluid and rapid search via various criteria, such as the sector of activity, the fields of competence or even geolocation. The algorithm sorts the results, prioritizing for example the number of requests from a person during a given period. "If a chartered accountant has been in high demand, it will be less visible during a predefined period during the research done by the user in order to leave visibility to other chartered accountants.", specifies the start-up.

Increase the number of specialized platforms by business and country

WeLink has automated all of its technology, from foreign language translation to servers, to rapidly deploy in other European markets. The solution allows to "multiply specialized platforms by profession while increasing the quality of visibility and that of the generated business", explains the start-up, which draws on the experience of its co-founders, creators of monavocat.com and moncourtier.com. Professionals, who pay a subscription to be referenced, are selected via, for example, verification of the number member of the order of chartered accountants, or, for building professionals, the verification of the Kbis, the document certifying the identity of a commercial enterprise registered in France.

After a first platform called "The Guide to Chartered Accountants", the company launched 6 months ago "The Guide to Building", now present in 4 countries. WeLink claims an increase in its monthly revenues of more than 20% over the past year, and targets 80,000 subscribers in 2023. The team has grown from 5 to 75 people in 2019 and will exceed 200 employees at the end of the year . Competition will nevertheless be fierce in the liberal professions market between behemoths like Doctolib, which has already won over healthcare professionals, and niche players like EldoTravo (building), Meetlaw or even Avostart (legal).

Aude Chardenon

 @ChardenonA 

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