London’s fintech sector continues to boom, with B2B credit control startup Kolleno raising £4m in seed-stage funding, led by Eurazeo and Stride.VC.
Euler Hermes, HubSpot and several angel investors also participated in the funding round.
Founded in 2020, Kolleno seeks to solve a problem that has plagued small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) for years – late payments.
Kolleno’s credit control and collections platform automates the management of a company’s accounts receivable department.
Using AI and machine learning, Kolleno automates collections from customers and businesses by detecting payments that are behind schedule and automatically sending reminders of the amount due via email and text message.
Kolleno claims that its machine learning tools can work out the best way to contact specific customers, as some respond differently to certain forms of communication. It can go so far as to recommend the perfect tone of voice, should the credit team need to call the customer.
Customers contacted via the Kolleno platform are also given access to a payments portal to allow an instant transfer of funds.
“The collections industry is behind the curve on its adoption of technology, so we saw an opportunity to create a 21st-century collections platform,” said Kolleno co-founder and CEO Dimitri Raziev.
“Our aim is to help credit controllers work more effectively and efficiently and to give CFOs a better understanding of their cash flow and working capital.
“Previously, businesses had to hire credit control specialists or give extra tasks to existing members of their team to manually monitor the payment dynamics of customers.”
The platform seeks to “remove repetitive tasks from employees and perform them faster and more accurately, freeing up time for staff to focus on higher value-added activities and speeding up the sales-to-cash timeframe,” according to Kolleno co-founder and CTO Ron Danenberg.
The UK-based firm after 18 months in business reports to have processed over 170,000 invoices for customers in the UK, Europe, North America and Africa.