London- and Lisbon-based startup Nook has raised an £800,000 pre-seed round to simplify B2B payments.
Its ‘trade collaboration platform’ overhauls the established world of B2B payments, which rely on PDF invoices, emails and manual data entry into bookkeeping systems.
Nook’s platform integrates with a business’s existing accounting software and bank accounts. It automatically extracts invoices and provides integrated approval and payment.
Nook also supports extracting invoice data from PDFs, but says businesses experience the full benefits when they share invoices and orders directly over Nook. This helps drive faster payment, debt chasing, and enforcement of payment terms.
Today Xero, Quickbooks, and Sage customers can take advantage of Nook’s simplified invoice workflow.
Co-founders Joe Lines and Henry Arnold began building Nook at the start of 2021, inspired by invoice fraud Arnold witnessed at a business he had been consulting for.
“This got us thinking deeply about how invoice fraud happens to businesses,” said Lines. “We realised that the majority of B2B payments rely on a PDF invoice and email, which is insecure and costly.
“Our vision is to create a trade network that ultimately replaces the need for businesses to exchange PDF documents.”
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Nook is beginning by addressing the UK market. “Today, over 50% of UK SMEs have already adopted cloud accounting solutions. It’s time that we have a secure and effortless approach for those solutions to talk to each other,” he added.
The pre-seed round was led by Speedinvest and TriplePoint. Ascension, Notion and angels including FinTech founders Michael Kent (founder of Azimo), Charlie Delingpole (founder of ComplyAdvantage and Market Invoice) and Emre Baran (founder of Qubit and Cerbos) also participated.
Nook will use the new funds to expand its product and engineering team, continue to evolve the product, and begin sales and marketing activity with SMEs and accountants.