Cardboard in 2024: Strengthening foundations, expanding horizons

Throughout 2024, Cardboard took several important steps forward. We started the year as a Norway-focused company working to streamline how businesses manage their SaaS (software as a service) spend. By the end of the year, we had established a more international footprint, broadened our product capabilities, and made noticeable progress on several fronts. We are happy to share our key developments and learnings with you!

Broadening our reach

During the early months, we began testing our product with pilot customers outside Norway. These early trials in European markets gave us useful insights into local accounting practices, business requirements, and customer expectations. While still in the early stages, these efforts helped shape our “global-first” mindset: adapting our onboarding, Know Your Customer (KYC) flows, and product features so they can function well across Europe.

We learned that certain markets were more competitive or had different expectations about payment workflows and accounting exports. Adjusting our sales focus and targeting in our focus markets helped us gather learnings and gain traction. Over time, we also started to see more organic signups, which was a welcome development, suggesting that our reputation is beginning to spread through word-of-mouth.

Another notable highlight from late 2024 was our participation in Innovation Norway’s TEA (Tech Executive Accelerator) program. Over three months, our team gained a first-hand feel of the UK by engaging directly with potential pilot customers, receiving warm introductions, and exploring partnerships. We also discovered frameworks we can reuse as we continue to grow, and benefited from diverse perspectives offered by mentors and fellow participants — insights that enriched our strategic and tactical discussions around international expansion. This structured environment helped us step back, think more broadly, and refine our plans for future growth.

Unboxing product innovations

One recurring theme this year has been reducing friction and complexity for our users. We refined KYC flows, making it easier and faster for new customers to get started. We rolled out direct accounting integrations in Norway and the UK. These integrations moved our product beyond CSV exports (which works with most accounting systems in Europe) and started to deliver more immediate value — no more waiting on accountants to manually process files. As a result, we noticed deeper usage from existing customers, and positive feedback from financial teams.

We also introduced interface improvements, making it simpler to identify active subscriptions and payment card usage. These changes were not dramatic in isolation, but collectively they contributed to a smoother, more reliable experience. Taken together, our product enhancements in 2024 helped Cardboard function better across different use cases and regions.

Raising our Seed round to propel business growth

Just before the summer break we secured €1.9M in seed funding led by Skyfall Ventures, with participation from RunwayFBU, Sondo Capital, and ProVenture. This round gave us the flexibility to invest in international growth, refine our sales strategies, and explore more markets. It also brought attention from business and tech media outlets, leading to coverage in Finansavisen, Tech.eu, EU-Startups, and others.

On the sales side, we tested various approaches. Not every experiment worked perfectly, but these trials helped us understand where we should focus our resources. Over time, we’ve refined our playbooks for different markets, begun tracking leads more effectively, and adjusted our targeting to find the types of organizations most likely to benefit from Cardboard’s offering.

Our inbound pipeline showed a positive trend with higher transaction volumes, better top-line performance, and more repeat usage from customers who integrated our solutions more deeply into their workflows.

Learning from customer feedback

We learned from our customers. Requests for new features and accounting integrations pushed us to continue improving.

For example, larger customers asked for more granular permissions on their payment cards. In October, we responded by introducing fine-grained card access controls, allowing administrators to decide which team members or departments could access individual cards.

Another common request involved integrating more deeply with popular accounting systems. We listened and invested in building direct integrations. By the end of the year, we supported PowerOffice, Fiken, Tripletex, and Xero — with more integrations in the pipeline!

A few larger customers asked if we could handle multiple subscriptions for the same vendor. They needed to set distinct accounting rules and cost centers per subscription instance, rather than treating every subscription identically. We took note of this feedback and built functionality to create multiple subscriptions for a single service, each configured independently. This change was small from a UI standpoint, but it opened the door to new use cases and upsell opportunities, such as agencies managing spend on behalf of multiple clients.

All these examples illustrate a recurring pattern: we gather feedback from actual usage, identify common pain points, and implement changes that align with our customers’ day-to-day needs. This feedback loop became part of our regular routine, helping us refine Cardboard from a tool that worked “well enough” into a platform that responds directly to the evolving requirements of businesses as they grow and diversify.

Steady growth in numbers

Starting with a modest revenue stream at the outset of 2024, we ended the year at roughly 6 times what we started with. Existing customers deepened their usage, onboarded sister companies, and referred us to their networks, while new customers from abroad joined the platform. This led our transaction volume to grow by 388% and we now handle over €7.2 million in annual transaction volume of software spends through our platform.

Taken together, these figures underscore the sustained adoption of Cardboard throughout the year, driven by an expanding feature set, deeper integrations, and a growing reputation across multiple markets.

Looking ahead

Kickstarting 2025, we have a broader perspective than we did at the start of last year. We’ve tested our product in multiple markets, refined core functionalities, and laid the groundwork for further expansion. We’ve improved the onboarding process, integrated with accounting systems that matter to our users, and found more efficient ways to identify and nurture leads.

Our work isn’t finished. We’ll keep learning as we go — adjusting our approach in each new market, refining our product to minimize effort for finance teams, and exploring new ways to reach customers who can benefit from what we offer. The foundation is stronger now, and we have the capacity to move forward with a bit more confidence and know-how.

In short, 2024 was a year of building and adapting, and 2025 is shaping up to be a year of ongoing innovation and expansion. We look forward to applying the lessons we learned this year as we continue to improve Cardboard for the many businesses that rely on our platform and reach out to more organizations across different markets — helping them gain control over software spending and automate their accounting processes.