Adfin raises USD $18 million to tackle late payments

Adfin has raised USD $18 million in Series A funding in a round led by Index Ventures.

The investment brings the London fintech's total funding to more than USD $30 million in less than two years. Visionaries Club joined the round, along with new investors Stéphane Kurgan, former Chief Operating Officer of King, and Miro founder Andrey Khusid.

Adfin sells software that helps businesses collect payments and manage cashflow. It is starting with invoice collection for small and medium-sized enterprises, where late payment remains a persistent problem in the UK.

Almost two-thirds of invoices sent by UK SMEs are paid late, according to figures cited by the company. Adfin says its customers see 9% of invoices paid late, compared with 63% across the wider market.

That gap is central to Adfin's pitch to investors and customers. Late payment can tie up working capital, slow recruitment and investment, and consume staff time that smaller companies often cannot spare.

Late payments drain 133 million hours from UK SMEs each year, according to company-cited figures. Adfin now serves more than 1,500 businesses across the country, including accounting and law firms as well as companies in professional services, trades and care.

Growth plans

The new funding will be used to expand the product into broader cashflow management, hire more engineers and sales staff, and prepare for international expansion. This marks a move beyond invoice collection into a wider set of finance workflows.

Adfin says its approach combines its own payments infrastructure with AI systems that recommend or automate the next step in collecting payment. Finance teams remain in control, while the software handles repetitive tasks such as reminders and follow-ups.

Its founders come from established names in payments and banking software. Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Tom Pope previously worked on payments infrastructure at Worldpay and Tink, the open banking company acquired by Visa for USD $2.2 billion. Co-founder Ciprian Diaconasu was the founding engineer at Mambu, the banking software group that reached a USD $5.3 billion valuation.

Adfin has also gained attention in Europe's start-up rankings. It was recently named the third fastest-growing technology company in Europe and the fastest-growing UK company by Scaling Europe, according to the company.

Investor backing

Index Ventures backed Adfin at earlier stages and has now increased its support. The fresh capital suggests investors still see room for specialist financial software providers, particularly those targeting operational friction in smaller businesses.

For many SMEs, delayed payment collection is both a financial and administrative burden. Businesses may need to devote staff to chasing unpaid invoices, while uncertain payment timing can make it harder to plan spending, payroll and investment.

Tom Pope outlined the company's direction in a statement alongside the funding announcement. "Adfin is building the agentic finance platform for money movement: automating the workflows finance teams use to get paid, manage their money, and, in time, much more. And we're doing it the way our customers keep telling us they want: safe, auditable, trackable, with humans firmly in control. By owning both the underlying financial infrastructure and the agentic workflows on top, we'll let finance teams deploy agents in a way nobody else can.

Why does this matter? If you're getting paid faster and optimising how you manage cash, you're building a better business. Money movement isn't admin, it's the bloodstream of every company. We believe this so strongly that we've rewritten our mission around it: Adfin exists to help the world build better businesses," Pope said.

A customer also highlighted the operational impact of reducing overdue invoices. "Since using Adfin we've seen nearly a 3x reduction in the number of our invoices that are paid late. It's had a meaningful impact on our cashflow. It also means our team no longer has to spend time chasing invoices, and instead can focus on serving our customers and growing our business," said Liam McHugh, Director, Steve Pye & Co.

Julia André, Partner at Index Ventures, said: "Index backs founders who have the rare ability to obsess over a problem and build category-defining businesses. We see that same pattern in Tom and Ciprian. We backed them at pre-seed and seed and we're tripling down, because their results speak for themselves."