Anchor, the autonomous billing platform, announces that it has finalized a $15 million seed-funding round.
Led by Rapyd Ventures, the new venture capital unit of Rapyd, Entrée Capital, an established venture capital firm that has invested in unicorns such as Monday.com and Riskified and Tal Ventures, a premier Israel based VC with an extensive portfolio of over 30 firms, including Rapyd, in which Tal’s previous fund was its first investor. Anchor will use the proceeds to expand its team and “extend its partnerships and marketing efforts.”
According to a report by Dun & Bradstreet, cash flow issues caused 90% of small business failures back in 2019. Around 60% of these businesses “were profitable but couldn’t handle the negative cash-flow gap caused mostly by late payments.”
Today, billing and collections are “labor-intensive, expensive, time-consuming, error-prone, and subject to fraud risk.” This systemic failure is “caused by the inherent manual labor in every billing cycle,” the update noted while adding that Anchor “completely automates the billing process, ensuring every business is paid on time and effortlessly.”
Anchor connects businesses and their clients via a ‘live online agreement’ that serves as “a single source of truth.”
Anchor’s autonomous end-to-end billing and payments solution “covers the entire cycle: starting with the vendor and client agreement and managing the invoicing, payment, and reconciliation steps.” The announcement also mentioned that the automation “frees businesses of all sizes to focus on doing billable work, instead of the time-consuming and costly manual work involved in trying to get paid on time.”
Anchor integrates with the client’s payment information and with the service provider’s technology stack, “so once the service is delivered, or upon the billing due date, the invoices are automatically populated and sent according to the agreement and deliverables.” Once payments are released, Anchor “automates the collections and reconciliation,” the announcement explained.
Rom Lakritz, Co-founder & CEO of Anchor, stated:
“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 Rapyd, remarked:
“We knew immediately that Anchor was a company in which we wanted to invest. It 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.”
Avi Eyal, co-founder and Managing Partner at Entrée Capital, added:
“The B2B payments space is highly fragmented due to each vertical requiring some level of specialization. Anchor has found such a unique opportunity and we believe it will go on to become a key player in the industry through the deployment of its solutions to thousands of service-oriented businesses.”
As mentioned in a release, Anchor gets businesses “paid on time, effortlessly. Anchor’s autonomous billing solution is a cloud-based platform that redefines B2B billing, collections, and payments.”
By offering an end-to-end billing and collections solution, and “removing all manual labor from these processes, Anchor eliminates the risks of fraud and human error in B2B payments.”
Established in 2021, Anchor is a US firm with an R&D Center in Israel. Backed by key players usch as Rapyd Ventures, Entrée Capital, Tal Ventures, and additional CEOs and founders from the tech and finance space, Anchor brings the SaaS billing experience “to the B2B service industry and is the first to support dynamic billing needs that change constantly.”
Anchor’s purpose is to “make business owners thrive, by allowing them to focus their time and resources on doing business, not billing.”