FastBill

Overview
FastBill is a Frankfurt am Main cloud invoicing and bookkeeping platform for freelancers and small businesses, operated by FastBill GmbH. It was founded in 2011 by Rene Maudrich and Christian Haefner and grew largely on its own cash flow. On 7 October 2021 the Canadian accounting-software company FreshBooks announced it had acquired FastBill; terms were not disclosed. In July 2024 Finance Forward reported, with Maudrich's confirmation, that he and co-managing director Benjamin Krischner had bought all shares back from FreshBooks in a management buyout. FastBill is therefore independent again and describes itself as owner-managed.

Why this entity matters
FastBill is a counter-example to the standard German startup narrative, and it earns the entity record on three grounds. It was not venture-scaled: it grew on its own revenue in an unglamorous, price-sensitive category crowded by sevdesk, lexoffice and easybill, and Finance Forward reports that outside investor money only entered the company a few years before the exit. It nonetheless produced a real cross-border exit — the 2021 sale shows how a mid-sized DACH SaaS asset becomes the fastest route into the German-speaking market for a North American incumbent that has capital but no local product, tax logic or adviser relationships. And it then produced something rarer: a buyout returning the company to its founders when the acquirer's strategy changed. That reversal gives DACH founders a documented precedent for renegotiating ownership after an exit. Taken together the three phases make FastBill a compact case study in how small German SaaS assets are financed, sold and, occasionally, bought back.

Company history and product
FastBill GmbH was founded in Frankfurt in 2011 by Rene Maudrich and Christian Haefner to make invoicing fast for freelancers and small firms. The product covers invoices and quotes, digital receipt capture, payment reconciliation, dunning, time tracking and preparing books for a tax adviser, with a DATEV export and the DATEV Rechnungsdatenservice, plus integrations for sellers on Amazon, Shopify, WooCommerce and Jimdo. A subscription-billing product runs under the Monsum brand. As reviewed in August 2026 the platform is sold in four tiers — Solo, Plus, Pro and Premium, listed from EUR 10 to from EUR 59 per month before VAT — with e-invoicing in the ZUGFeRD and XRechnung formats included at every level, GoBD-compliant archiving and German hosting; the Premium tier adds automatic receipt import and processing, automatic bank reconciliation, automated dunning and a real-time financial overview. The company states it has served more than 70,000 customers, a company-reported figure.

On 7 October 2021 FreshBooks of Toronto, then reporting paying customers in more than 160 countries, announced the acquisition. FastBill at that point had about 30 staff and paying customers in 16 European countries; the team joined FreshBooks and stayed in Frankfurt, reporting to FreshBooks' newly appointed SVP of Markets, and Maudrich remained chief executive while also becoming managing director of FreshBooks Germany. Terms were never disclosed; Finance Forward called the price presumed to be in the low double-digit millions of euros, an estimate, not a confirmed figure. In July 2024 the same publication reported a management buyout in which Maudrich and Krischner reacquired all shares from FreshBooks, which had been cutting costs through several rounds of redundancies, had lost senior managers including its chief executive, and had largely withdrawn from Europe to concentrate on North America. Maudrich said the company was profitable, did not need investor money, and would refocus on the German-speaking market, with mandatory B2B e-invoicing an expected growth driver.

Role in the DACH startup and technology ecosystem
FastBill is among the longer-standing Frankfurt/Rhine-Main fintech companies and one of few German SaaS businesses in its category with a documented cross-border exit. Its niche sits where two Startuprad.io themes meet. The first is the German small-business software market, in which the tax-adviser relationship and the DATEV interface are a structural requirement rather than a feature: software that cannot hand a clean data set to a Steuerberater does not get adopted, which is why foreign entrants usually buy rather than build. The second is the digitalisation of German accounting. Under the Wachstumschancengesetz, passed by the Bundesrat in March 2024, every German business has had to be able to receive structured B2B e-invoices since 1 January 2025, with the obligation to issue them following in January 2027 for companies above EUR 800,000 turnover and in January 2028 for everyone else. That phased mandate pushes a long tail of very small firms toward software they had previously avoided, and it is the growth driver Maudrich named after the buyback. The company also illustrates the region's capital pattern — bootstrapped for years, sold to a North American buyer, then repatriated — and its customer concentration in IT, consulting and the skilled trades maps onto the Mittelstand rather than the startup scene. Since at latest 2022 it has worked remote-first from an office at the Frankfurt trade-fair district.

Selected relationships and affiliations
Founders: Rene Maudrich and Christian Haefner (2011). Leadership: Maudrich as chief executive with Benjamin Krischner as co-managing director, described by the company as a serial founder in his own right; some trade reporting spells the name Kirschner. Mario Hachemer is named as chief technology officer on the company's own site. Owner 2021 to 2024: FreshBooks of Toronto, led at the time of the deal by Don Epperson, which had shortly before announced a USD 130 million raise at a USD 1 billion valuation and which Finance Forward described in 2024 as having around 30 million users across 160 countries. Ecosystem: DATEV integration for tax advisers, e-commerce integrations with Amazon, Shopify, WooCommerce and Jimdo, a receipt-import add-on built on GetMyInvoices, and the Monsum subscription-billing brand. Competitors named in German trade coverage: sevdesk, lexoffice and easybill. Related Startuprad.io entity: https://www.startuprad.io/entities/qonto .

Startuprad.io relevance
FastBill is a Frankfurt fintech reference entity in the Startuprad.io graph, linking the German SME-software cluster to the exit and M&A cluster. Three tagged posts cover it: the analysis of the FreshBooks exit, the October 2021 DACH startup news roundup from the month of the announcement, and the Rhine-Main regional review.

Public source context
Sources used: the FreshBooks acquisition release of 7 October 2021 at https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2021/10/07/2309989/0/en/FreshBooks-Announces-Acquisition-of-Germany-based-FastBill-Accelerating-Global-Expansion.html ; Finance Forward on the 2021 deal and on the July 2024 management buyout at https://financefwd.com/de/gruender-kauft-fastbill-zurueck/ ; FastBill's own company and pricing pages at https://www.fastbill.com/ueber-uns and https://www.fastbill.com/preise ; and public summaries of the German B2B e-invoicing mandate under the Wachstumschancengesetz.

Startuprad.io coverage of FastBill

FastBill appears in the following Startuprad.io interviews, analysis and long-form profiles.

Fastbill's Exit to Canada Based Unicorn FreshBooks
Published: 24 December 2021
Last updated: 27 August 2026
Coverage type: Analysis
https://www.startuprad.io/post/fastbill-s-exit-to-canada-based-unicorn-freshbooks

DACH Startup News October 2021: Founders, Funding and Ecosystem Updates
Published: 27 October 2021
Last updated: 14 August 2026
Coverage type: News
https://www.startuprad.io/post/this-month-in-german-startups-october-2021

Rhine-Main Review 2020 and 2021 Outlook
Published: 29 March 2020
Last updated: 26 August 2026
Coverage type: Quarterly Review
https://www.startuprad.io/post/rhine-main-review-2020-and-2021-outlook

About this record. This is the public Level 1 layer of Startuprad.io's entity intelligence architecture. Startuprad.io's deeper entity intelligence may include extended profiles, verified relationships, source trails, historical development, monitoring, news signals, custom entity sets, and analytical relationship mapping. These deeper layers are available through Startuprad.io's research, intelligence, and enterprise services.

Need deeper entity intelligence? Startuprad.io provides extended profiles, monitored entity sets, relationship analysis, source-backed research, and custom intelligence services for companies, investors, and institutions. → https://www.startuprad.io/become-a-partner

About Startuprad.io
Startuprad.io is a European B2B media, data and intelligence platform. It provides structured entity and ecosystem data, source-backed research, datasets and AI/training-data solutions, as well as strategic visibility and access to a professional European audience of founders, investors, executives and B2B decision-makers.

Organizations use Startuprad.io for intelligence and research, structured data and AI applications, executive and company positioning, and trusted B2B reach across Europe.

Canonical record: https://www.startuprad.io/entities/fastbill