Boost for UK fintech as Receipt Bank secures huge $50 million in funding

Receipt Bank

LONDON — Accountancy software startup Receipt Bank has raised $50 million (£38.4 million) in a Series B funding round led by a New York venture capital firm.

Insight Venture Partners led the investment, one of the biggest deals in UK fintech since Brexit.

Receipt Bank, launched in 2010, is a bookkeeping service aimed at small businesses. It was the first software company to automatically process information from uploaded images of receipts and invoices, cutting down the time lost to manually sorting them. Businesses also have the option to send push notifications to clients' phones to remind them to submit invoices and receipts.

Receipt Bank is used by more than 5,000 accounting and bookkeeping firms and over 100,000 of their small business clients, the company says. The company plans to hire 40 new UK-based staff as a result of the funding.

"Bookkeeping is at a pivotal point as automation technologies and artificial intelligence are bringing it out of the back office," Alexis Prenn, CEO of Receipt Bank, said in a statement. "With Receipt Bank, bookkeeping moves from a cost to a source of income — becoming the enabler of effective reporting, payments, lending and other value-added services.

"This investment will enable us to further develop our proprietary technologies and bring these services to even more leading accounting and bookkeeping firms and their small business clients," he said.

The company joins the cohort of UK fintech startups that have recently secured funding, including Soldo, Tide, Curve, and Revolut. It follows a slowdown in funding in the second half of 2016 and fears that Brexit could have hampered activity.

Brad Twohig, Managing Director at Insight Venture Partners, said the firm was attracted by Receipt Bank's use of artificial intelligence in its product to read receipts.

Twohig says in a statement: "Artificial intelligence has become a clear disruptor in several industries, including financial services. Receipt Bank is an industry-leader in using emerging technology to drive core functions forward."

The funding adds to the $15 million (£11.5 million) previously raised by the company and will allow it to develop new features and expand. Last year the company passed $10 million (£7.7 million) in annual recurring revenue and is growing at 100% every year, the company said on Thursday.

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