Manchester-based invoice financing fintech raises $10.6 million
(19 September 2016 – United Kingdom) DueCourse, a cloud-based invoice financing service for small to medium enterprises (SMEs), has raised £6.25 million (A$10.6 million) in a new round of capital raising.
Investors include Rocket Internet’s venture capital arm, Global Founders Capital among other entrepreneurs such as Alex Chesterman (founder and CEO of Zoopla), and Simon Franks (co-founder of Lovefilm, acquired by Amazon).
Reflecting the firm’s business model, the additional capital is comprised of £1.25 million in equity and £5 million of debt.
DueCourse provides SMEs access to cash tied up to unpaid invoices. However, rather than employing the popular peer-to-peer lending marketplace, the fintech will provide financing.
“We allow small businesses using cloud accounting the ability to access the money tied-up in their unpaid invoices whenever they like, in just a few clicks,” said DueCourse co-founder and CEO Paul Haydock.
“The product is free to install, setup takes minutes, and any money requested is then in their bank account within an hour”.
According to the firm, its in-house risk modelling and access to pull data from cloud accounting services such Xero, SageOne and FreeAgeny allows it to provide SMEs with fast access to invoice financing.
“The rise of cloud accounting within the SME market over the past few years has enabled us to access real-time accounting information, which we combine with other external sources of data to generate a proprietary risk score for lending to small businesses,” says Haydock.
Reportedly, the startup plans to raise a Series A round of £10-15 million in the next 10 months, with plans to expand its services worldwide.
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