Adfin lands £13.2m to cut SME late payments with AI payment rails
This article covers Adfin, a London fintech startup, which has raised £13.2m in a series A funding round to expand a platform that automates invoice chasing and payments for small and mid-sized businesses. The funding aims to scale the platform to reduce late payments and free up working capital for UK SMEs while easing the manual burden on finance teams.
Adfin, a London fintech startup, has raised £13.2m in a series A funding round to expand a platform that automates invoice chasing and payments for small and mid-sized businesses. The raise — led by Index Ventures and bringing the company’s total funding to more than £22m in under two years — matters because late payments remain a systemic drain on UK SMEs and investors are increasingly backing firms that automate cashflow operations.
Why it matters
Late payments are a persistent problem for UK small businesses: research cited by Adfin puts the proportion of late invoices at about 63 percent for UK SMEs. Adfin says its customers experience late-payment rates of roughly 9 percent, which the company frames as materially lower than the national average. If those figures hold across its user base, improved receivables performance could free up working capital for thousands of businesses and reduce the manual burden on finance teams.
The funding comes as investor interest in fintech infrastructure and automation continues to grow. Adfin’s recognition by Scaling Europe as one of the fastest-growing technology companies in Europe underscores the pace of its adoption to date.
Inside the product
Adfin combines proprietary payment rails with agentic AI workflows that decide how to chase, reconcile and clear invoices on behalf of clients. The company positions these autonomous workflows as a way to mimic and scale the tasks that finance teams currently do manually: selecting recovery methods, routing payments and reconciling accounts.
The platform now serves more than 1,500 businesses across the UK, including accounting and law firms, and providers in professional services, trades and care. Adfin says the Series A will fund work to expand the product into end-to-end cashflow management, accelerate hiring in engineering and sales, and prepare for international expansion. The company did not disclose post-money valuation, revenue figures or customer concentration by vertical.
Who are the investors?
The round was led by Index Ventures, which previously backed Adfin at pre-seed and seed stages. Visionaries Club participated again, and the round includes new individual backers Stéphane Kurgan, the former chief operating officer of King, and Andrey Khusid, founder of collaborative whiteboard platform Miro.
In the announcement, 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
Index describes its investment as “tripling down” on the founding team after earlier-stage commitments. The participation from senior operators such as Kurgan and Khusid signals interest from experienced product and scaling executives rather than only institutional capital.
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Founder perspective
Tom Pope, Adfin’s co-founder and chief executive, framed the company’s approach around combining underlying financial rails with agentic workflows to automate money movement and cashflow functions.
In the announcement, Tom Pope, co-founder and CEO at Adfin, said:
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
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
Pope also emphasised human oversight on the platform, noting workflows are auditable and trackable so finance teams remain in control.
Co-founder Ciprian Diaconasu brings payments engineering experience as an early engineer at Mambu, the banking platform now used by customers such as N26 and Tide. Pope’s background includes roles at Worldpay and at Tink, which was acquired by Visa.
Clients report measurable improvements. Liam McHugh, director at Norwich-based accounting practice Steve Pye & Co, told the company the platform delivered roughly a threefold reduction in his firm’s late-payment rate and freed staff from manual invoice chasing.
The bigger picture
Adfin sits at the intersection of payments infrastructure and automation, two hot areas for fintech investment. The startup’s bid to move from accounts-receivable tooling toward broader cashflow management follows a broader trend: investors are favouring firms that own more of the stack and can surface higher-value automation on top.
Competition will come from other payments infrastructure providers and specialist collections products, and adoption will depend on proof that automated, agent-driven workflows can reliably match or improve outcomes compared with human-led processes.
This raise also highlights the continuing role of London as a base for fintech engineering talent and investor appetite for infrastructure plays. As Adfin prepares to hire and scale internationally, its progress will be another data point in how UK fintechs convert early traction into wider market share across Europe and beyond.
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