Adfin raises $18m to automate how small businesses get paid
The London fintech says only 9% of its customers’ invoices are paid late. Now it wants AI agents to run credit control, with people keeping the final say
- Total raised: more than $30m in under two years
- Index Ventures also backed Adfin’s pre-seed and seed rounds
- Adfin puts the share of UK businesses that are paid late at 63%
- Scaling Europe named Adfin the fastest-growing UK startup, the company says
- Pricing: customers pay only for successful payments, with daily settlement
Adfin picked one narrow, painful job and built the payment rails before adding AI on top. That order matters: agents that chase invoices are only as useful as the collection data underneath, and owning both is harder to copy than a chatbot bolted onto someone else’s platform. The pitch also leads with control rather than autonomy, which suits small-business buyers wary of handing customer relationships to software.
“Money movement isn’t admin, it’s the bloodstream of every company.”Tom Pope and Ciprian Diaconasu, co-founders, Adfin, in the company’s Series A blog post
Adfin, a London company that collects payments and chases invoices for small businesses, announced on 12 May 2026 that it had closed an $18m (£13.3m) Series A. Index Ventures led the round.
Visionaries Club, an existing backer, also invested, alongside two new individual investors: Stéphane Kurgan and Andrey Khusid, founder of Miro. Adfin serves more than 1,500 UK businesses, from accounting and law firms to trades and care, according to BusinessCloud.
The money pays for a move beyond collection into wider finance automation. First up is what Adfin calls customer agents: software that calculates late fees and tailors reminder sequences to each customer, while the business decides how much to automate and where to step in. According to BusinessCloud, chief executive Tom Pope spent more than a decade building payments infrastructure at Worldpay and Tink, co-founder Ciprian Diaconasu was the founding engineer at Mambu. The company plans to hire across engineering and sales and to prepare for international expansion, the same report says.
Sources
- Adfin, “Announcing our Series A: Raising $18 million to help the world build better businesses”, company blog, 12 May 2026. https://adfin.com/blog/series-a
- BusinessCloud, “Payments veterans bag £13m for UK’s fastest-growing firm Adfin”, 12 May 2026. https://businesscloud.co.uk/news/payments-veterans-bag-13m-for-uks-fastest-growing-firm-adfin/
