DueCourse, a cloud-based invoice financing service for SMEs, raises £6.25M

DueCourse, a cloud-based totally invoice financing carrier for SMEs, has raised £6.25 million in new funding. Backers embody GFC (the venture arm of Rocket web), Alex Chesterman (founder and CEO of Zoopla), and Simon Franks (co-founding father of Lovefilm, received by way of Amazon). additionally noteworthy is that the new capital is a cut up between £1.25 million of fairness and £5 million of debt.

The latter is a reflection of the Manchester, UK firm’s business variation: it lets small to medium-sized businesses get right of entry to money tied up in their but-to-be-paid invoices. however, fairly than working a peer-to-peer lending market, DueCourse is doing the real the lending, hence its own debt-financing.

“We enable small companies the use of cloud accounting the ability to get admission to the money tied-up of their unpaid invoices whenever they like, in only some clicks,” explains DueCourse co-founder and CEO Paul Haydock. “The product is free to put in, setup takes minutes, and any cash requested is then in their bank account within an hour”.

the ability to SMEs invoice financing as any such fast fee is born out of DueCourse’s use of information and its own risk models. This comprises pulling in data from the cloud accounting services and products it plugs into, which include Xero, SageOne, and FreeAgent.

“the rise of cloud accounting throughout the SME market during the last few years has enabled us to get admission to actual-time accounting knowledge, which we combine with other exterior sources of knowledge to generate a proprietary chance rating for lending to small companies,” says Haydock.

This then allows the startup to generate a possibility score that combined with DueCourse’s “data-pushed resolution engine” tells companies (a) whether they are eligible to take advances in opposition to invoices and (b) the associated fee to get admission to the money in tied up in unpaid invoices.

He also says that DueCourse differs from the traditional invoice finance version, which requires an SME to handover all invoices, signal a lengthy contract, “and includes the finance firm informing all clients that the SME is in a finance association”.

In distinction, DueCourse is private (end clients are by no means conscious a trade is using the provider). “businesses can make a selection how continuously they use it, and when they use it, whether that’s hiring new folks, funding new resources or buying tools,” adds Haydock.

in the meantime, I’m told that the corporate plans to boost a series A spherical of £10-15 million in the next 10 months to enlarge its provider globally.