Mark Holleman, co-founder of Thred, on bringing accounting into the platforms small businesses already use and what it took to start a second company after Sprinque shut down.
Embedded finance is usually all about payments, banking, lending, investments, and insurance. But there are adjacent areas evolving with the same logic, and embedded accounting is one of them. This episode is about understanding what it actually is, how it works, and where it might fit.
In this Embedded Finance Review Podcast episode, I speak with Mark Holleman, co-founder of Thred. Mark is a returning guest. The last time we spoke, we discussed embedded lending and the build-versus-buy decision. His first startup, the lending provider Sprinque, has since shut down. Now Mark and one of his Sprinque co-founders, Manoj, have started Thred. They are building the layer they wished existed when they offered lending products: an embedded accounting layer for vertical SaaS, SME banks, and financial platforms across Europe.
In this episode, we cover:
- What embedded accounting actually means for a vertical SaaS like a yoga studio platform, a tattoo studio tool, or a plumber app
- How Thred's stack works: a set of APIs for the platform, an SDK for the frontend, and an agentic layer that runs the books in the background with humans in the loop
- Why every journal entry gets a confidence score, and what changes when bookkeepers go from serving 20 companies to serving 300
- The dual go-to-market: direct customers for traction and trust, embedded partners for scale
- How banks, accounting software, and vertical SaaS are all converging toward the same financial operating system for SMEs, and why none of them has all the data
- Why Europe is behind the US on embedded accounting, what Mark learned from the US competitors, and where Sage and HSBC fit in
- Whether embedded accounting is also the data layer that finally makes embedded lending work
- Why this time around, Mark can build with a much leaner team than at Sprinque