Fundbox, a San Francisco-based start-up that helps business owners fix their cash flow by transferring the amount of outstanding invoices to their bank accounts, has secured a $17.5 million funding round led by Khosla Ventures and featuring an all-star team of private investors, including former Citigroup chief Vikram Pandit, ex-Reuters head Tom Glocer, ISE chairman David Krell, and Jay Mandelbaum, one-time head of strategy and e-commerce at JPMorgan Chase.
Focused initially on allowing small businesses to immediately clear outstanding invoices and improve cash flow, the two-year old company has ambitions to extend its data analytics and risk engine into other part of the supply chain.
Fundbox founder and CEO Eyal Shinar, says: "Our proprietary engine can dramatically disrupt and modernise entire industries built around analysing data. We are starting with small business credit because this is where we can have a significant and immediate positive impact, but the future is boundless."
Operating in stealth mode for the past two years, the company already processes tens of thousands of invoices daily, offering small business owners the ability to fix their cash flow by advancing payments for unpaid invoices.
The Fundbox risk engine taps into numerous data signals - including the user's financial health, the demographics of their customers, and even the seasonal nature of some specific businesses - to assess customers and invoices for risk automatically and instantly, allowing small businesses to choose which invoices to clear with a single click.
Shinar says the new funding will be used to scale the data operations and product, increase marketing outreach efforts, expand the Fundbox San Francisco headquarters, and make additional strategic hires in the Bay Area.
"Every small business wishes for convenient access to capital at a fair price, but for most, that is just wishful thinking," says David Weiden, partner at Khosla Ventures. "Fundbox leverages newly available cloud services and deep data science to deliver financial services that simply were not possible before, and that's the kind of disruption that can really affect an industry and build a great company."