Previse, an established invoice financing platform, has secured $11 million in capital through an investment round led by Mastercard and Reefknot Investments.
Existing investors Augmentum Fintech, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Hambro Perks also took part in the round.
Established in 2016, Previse aims to address the systemic inefficiencies in the existing supplier payments platforms during a time when the world is struggling to cope with the Coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis and resulting economic challenges.
Previse’s proprietary technology uses artificial intelligence (AI) to examine corporate invoices, identify those which require manual intervention, and set up instant payouts on the others.
The Fintech firm’s InstantPay solution is presently handling about 100,000 invoices each day and the company plans to work with five million businesses in the coming years.
Previse is notably a part of the Start Path program launched by Mastercard.
The card scheme has used InstantPay with a small group of its own suppliers in order to make business-to-business (B2B) commerce more efficient and manageable.
James Anderson, executive vice president of global commercial products at Mastercard, stated:
“The business world has accelerated, but the payments that enable it remain stuck in neutral. Effort needs to be applied to more strategic work and back-offices need tools to help streamline operations. It is solutions and innovations like those being driven by Previse and Mastercard, through banks to their corporate customers, that will help businesses support their suppliers, and liberate them from inefficient processes.”
As explained on its official website, Previse’s algorithms analyze the financial data from the invoices that sellers share with their corporate clients.
The company uses predictive analytics to “identify the few problematic invoices, enabling the rest to be paid instantly.”