U.K. startup Previse, an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered invoice financing platform, has announced new seed funding.
Recent reports said Previse raised $2.58 million in funding from Hambro Perks, which led the round, as well as Founders Factory. Previse uses artificial intelligence and Big Data to assess the likelihood a company will pay its invoices, then provides that assessment to financiers through its platform. Financiers have the option to buy up supplier invoices at a discount, allowing those suppliers to get paid quicker.
Philipp Schoenbucher, co-founder and chief data scientist at Previse, said the company is focused on cutting-edge technology.
“Our advanced proprietary machine learning algorithms were developed using data sets of multiple billion dollars of corporate spending, building upon state-of-the-art binary classifiers and highly innovative domain-specific feature engineering methods,” said Schoenbucher.
Paul Christensen, Previse’s CEO, added that small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) need to be paid more quickly to support their broader economies.
“SMEs are the backbone of the world economy, generating the majority of growth, employment and innovation,” Christensen said. “Yet, most of them are consistently paid late by corporate buyers. It is an unsustainable position which damages the entire economy.”
Christensen noted Previse’s AI technology ensures the situation will change.
“Instant, frictionless and efficient payments can become the new standard for B2B payments,” said Christensen. “The prize is 50,000 more small businesses kept open in the U.K. alone, corporates able to exceed their obligations to suppliers and a new £2.4 trillion ($3.1 trillion USD) global market for funders.”
Invoice financing company Populous launched earlier this year, using distributed ledger technology to develop a digital marketplace for SMEs and financiers to match and get unpaid invoices financed. Blockchain has been a popular choice for FinTech companies to explore in invoice financing solutions, with some banks also eyeing the technology.
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