London fintech Adfin has closed an $18 million Series A round, pushing its total funding past $30 million in under two years, as it targets the stubborn problem of late invoice payments plaguing British small businesses.
Index Ventures led the round, joined by existing backer Visionaries Club and two new individual investors: Stéphane Kurgan, former chief operating officer at mobile gaming company King, and Andrey Khusid, the founder of digital collaboration platform Miro.
Why UK Small Businesses Keep Chasing Unpaid Bills
The numbers behind Adfin’s pitch are hard to ignore. Around 63% of invoices issued by UK small and medium-sized businesses are paid late, straining cashflow and limiting the capacity to hire, invest, or grow. Businesses that process payments through Adfin’s platform report only 9% of invoices going overdue, compared to that 63% national average.
Adfin tackles the gap by combining its own payment infrastructure with AI-driven workflow tools. The platform determines the most effective follow-up action for each unpaid invoice, routes transactions between bank-transfer and card rails to maximize success at the lowest cost, and automates reminder sequences so finance teams spend less time on manual chasing. Clients include accounting firms, legal practices, care providers, and tradespeople.
“Adfin is building the agentic finance platform for money movement: automating the workflows finance teams use to get paid, manage their money, and, in time, much more,” CEO Tom Pope said in a statement. “By owning both the underlying financial infrastructure and the agentic workflows on top, we’ll let finance teams deploy agents in a way nobody else can.”
Founders With Deep Payments Pedigree
Pope and co-founder Ciprian Diaconasu bring experience that goes well beyond the average startup pitch. Pope built the payments business at Tink, the open banking platform that Visa acquired for $2.2 billion. Diaconasu was the founding engineer at Mambu, the cloud banking platform that reached a $5.3 billion valuation and counts N26, Tide, and Western Union among its clients. He led Mambu’s global developer team of 200 engineers before leaving to build Adfin.
Index Ventures backed the company at both pre-seed and seed stage before leading this Series A, a pattern that signals sustained conviction rather than a late-stage bet. The firm’s earlier $4.9 million seed round, co-led with Visionaries Club and disclosed in July 2024, drew in angels from across the European fintech scene including the Checkout.com founder and the Mambu co-founder.
How Adfin Plans to Use the Money
The fresh capital goes toward three areas. Adfin will expand its product from invoice collection into full end-to-end cashflow management, giving businesses a single platform for monitoring money in and out. It will hire across engineering and sales teams. And it will begin international expansion beyond the UK, though specific target markets have not yet been named.
The company now serves more than 1,000 UK businesses across professional services, healthcare, and trades, according to figures cited in investor communications around the raise.
