Anchor Secures $15M Seed Funding for Autonomous Billing

The Challenge of Delayed Payments for Businesses

Many companies dedicate a disproportionate amount of time to pursuing overdue payments, diverting focus from their primary operations and creating cash flow difficulties.

The inefficiencies and obstacles encountered during payment recovery are largely attributable to reliance on manual billing procedures. These processes are often cumbersome, time-intensive, and susceptible to errors and fraudulent activity.

Introducing Anchor: An Automated Billing Solution

Anchor, a U.S.-based startup with a research and development facility in Israel, aims to address these shortcomings. They are focused on streamlining billing, collection, and payment processes through automation.

The company’s cloud-based platform automates the complete billing and payment cycle for service providers, significantly reducing the time businesses spend requesting payment from clients and mitigating the occurrence of late payments.

Having launched earlier this year, Anchor recently announced plans to accelerate expansion. This will involve team growth, strategic client partnerships, and a comprehensive marketing campaign, fueled by $15 million in seed funding.

Vision and Investment

“This moment signifies the dawn of a new era in payments, rendering current B2B payment methods obsolete and redefining the standards for billing, collections, and payments in the contemporary business landscape,” stated Rom Lakritz, co-founder and CEO of Anchor.

“Our priority was to develop a solution that fosters trust in vendor-client relationships and eliminates invoice fraud and human error,” Lakritz continued. “Ultimately, we envision Anchor becoming a fundamental component and the industry benchmark for business transactions.”

The funding round was jointly led by Rapyd Ventures, the venture capital division of Rapyd; Entrée Capital, a firm with investments in companies like Monday.com and Riskified; and Tal Ventures, an Israel-based VC firm.

Arik Shtilman, CEO of Rapyd, commented, “We immediately recognized Anchor as a company worthy of investment. They demonstrate a keen understanding of the future of payments and have created a modern framework for B2B payments and billing, poised to become essential for all businesses.”

How Anchor’s Platform Works

Anchor’s platform establishes a connection between businesses and their clients through a “live online agreement.”

Its self-executing, end-to-end billing and payment solution manages vendor and client agreements, encompassing invoicing, payment, and reconciliation procedures.

The system integrates with client payment details and service provider technologies. This ensures automatic invoice generation and delivery upon service completion or bill due dates, as outlined in the agreed-upon contracts.

Industry Perspective and Impact

“The B2B payments sector is characterized by fragmentation, with each industry requiring a degree of specialization,” explained Avi Eyal, co-founder and managing partner of Entrée Capital.

“Anchor has identified a unique opportunity, and we are confident it will emerge as a leading player in the industry by deploying its solutions to numerous service-oriented businesses,” added Eyal.

Cash flow issues represent a significant obstacle to growth, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) globally.

Late payments are a primary contributor to these challenges, impacting the businesses that form the foundation of most economies.

In the U.S., SMEs contribute 44% of all economic activity.

A survey conducted by Melio and YouGov revealed that a substantial number of U.S. businesses experience late payments. Specifically, 25% of respondents reported waiting up to 30 days beyond the payment due date, jeopardizing their operational stability.

The Role of Technology in Solving Payment Issues

However, these difficulties can be effectively addressed through technological solutions.

“The complexities of billing and collections, which often make vendor payments a challenging process, originate from human intervention,” Lakritz stated.

“If businesses could trust invoices from service providers as readily as they trust machine-generated invoices from platforms like Spotify and Amazon, billing and payments would become seamless, and cash flow would circulate more freely within the estimated $120 trillion annual market.”