Autonomous billing platform Anchor has emerged from stealth with a $15 million seed funding round led by Rapyd Ventures, Entrée Capital, and Tal Ventures.
Anchor says that billing and collections are labour-intensive, expensive, time-consuming, error-prone, and subject to fraud risk, leading to cash flow problems that dog small businesses, causing many to fail.
Its answer is a platform that connects businesses and their clients through a ‘live online agreement’ that serves as a single source of truth. The autonomous end-to-end billing and payments system covers the entire cycle: starting with the vendor and client agreement and managing the invoicing, payment, and reconciliation steps.
This automation, says the startup, frees businesses to focus on doing billable work, instead of the time-consuming and costly manual work involved in trying to get paid on time.
Rom Lakritz, CEO, Anchor, says: "The challenges of billing and collections, which make paying a vendor a hefty process, stem from the human element.
"If people could trust the invoices they receive from service providers just like they trust machine-generated invoices from their Spotify and Amazon accounts, billing and payments would no longer be a painful process, and cash would easily flow in a market estimated at over $120 trillion annually."
Arik Shtilman, CEO of payments-as-a-service unicorn Rapyd - which is investing through its new venture arm - says Anchor "has its finger on the pulse of the future of payments and has built a modern framework for B2B payments and billing, poised to become necessary for every business".