French startup Swile,  which provides,  a payment card for employee benefits, such as meal vouchers, has raised a $200 million within the framework of another funding round.

Techcrunch reports that with this funding round, the startup has now reached unicorn status, meaning that Swile has a valuation of $1 billion or more. The round is led by SoftBank International Group.

Michel Combes, SoftBank International Group’s president has joined Swile’s board.

Some of the startup’s existing investors are participating once again, such as Eurazeo, Index Ventures and Bpifrance. Headline is also investing in Swile for the first time.

This is a significant round for the company as it keeps raising bigger rounds year after year. In 2018 the startup raised $17.4 million, in 2019 - $34.7 million and in 2020 - $81 million.

Swile started as a payment card to hold employee’s meal vouchers. In France, companies have to contribute to lunch when it’s in the middle of a work day. Some companies offer a cafeteria with cheap meals, others hand out meal vouchers that you can spend in restaurants and bakeries.

But the experience is a bit confusing when you’re paying for lunch. Employees often ask whether a restaurant accepts meal vouchers. And if you want to spend more than your daily budget, you have to use two cards.

With Swile, employees can optionally add their personal debit card to the Swile app. When you spend more than your daily limit, Swile automatically charges your personal card.

Just four years after launch, Swile has captured a 13% market share on meal vouchers in France.

In addition to small and medium companies, the startup has managed to convince bigger clients, such as supermarket chain Carrefour and its 65,000 employees in France. Other clients include Doctolib, Spotify and Airbnb in France.

Beyond the Swile card and its transactional revenue, the startup wants to build an app to improve internal communications, run anonymous surveys and gather feedback from employees. Swile has acquired Briq for its expertise on that area.

Swile also has ambitious international goals - Brazil, Mexico look like promising markets.

By 2022, Swile wants to hire 500 employees - the company will double in size.

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