Dost, an AI-powered financial automation platform, has launched in the UK market following a £6 million Series A funding round led by Octopus Ventures.
Barcelona-based Dost says that it is bringing ‘battle-tested’ technology to these shores as it is already deployed across 150+ European enterprises across food, retail, manufacturing and other sectors. It has processed more than 4m accounting transactions since its foundation in 2021.
It is aiming to tackle a challenge plaguing British mid-market businesses: finance teams mired in manual invoice processing, data entry errors and approval bottlenecks.
Following a successful pilot phase with early UK enterprise customers across manufacturing, construction, logistics, and automotive sectors, Dost is now formalising its UK presence with a dedicated seven-person local team for sales, marketing, and customer success.
The company’s CEO and co-founder, Adam Barbera, has relocated to London to lead the expansion.
Unlike competitors relying on third-party OCR (Optical Character Recognition) tools, Dost has built proprietary AI models trained specifically for complex, high-volume financial document processing.
Its platform automates the entire procure-to-pay and order-to-cash lifecycle, with a focus on what the founding team calls the ‘real economy’ – established sectors with intricate supply chains and multi-page invoices that generic automation tools struggle to handle.
“We spent the last three years solving these problems for European companies – refining our AI on millions of real-world transactions,” said Barbera.
“UK businesses face identical challenges, but the market is significantly larger and more receptive to proven innovation. The endorsement from Octopus Ventures validates that our technology translates across borders – and that we’re ready to scale here.”
Uthish Ranjan, partner at Octopus Ventures, said: “Dost is an AI-native platform tackling one of finance’s most entrenched inefficiencies – invoice processing. Its product thrives in the messy, unstructured reality of mid-market and enterprise operations.
“The customer feedback we heard speaks for itself: they’re consistently impressed by Dost’s ability to process complex data at scale with remarkable accuracy.
“We’re excited to back Adam and the team – founders with deep operational finance experience and the technical capability to thoughtfully apply AI to real problems in their vertical. We’re proud to support them as they build on strong momentum and double down in the UK.”
The Series A round also included participation from new investor TQ Ventures, as well as continued support from existing backers such as Draper B1, Born Capital or Eoniq.fund.