Berlin based invoice financing company Bezahlt has secured €3.5m in venture funding from Fly Ventures, German Startups Group, La Famiglia Investments and multiple private investors. Bezahlt is specifically targeting the self-employed and freelancers — the “WeWork generation” — and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) who, it claims, have yet to benefit from the advantages of invoice factoring that many corporate players take for granted.
It was long-rumoured that Sebastian Diemer, who co-founded credit scoring and loans company Kreditech, was doing another startup in the fintech space and today that new venture de-cloaks. Bezahlt.de, which, along with Diemer, counts numerous other ex-Kreditech employees as part of its founding team, is taking aim at the German ‘factoring’ market. Invoice factoring (or invoice financing) is where companies secure credit by selling outstanding invoices to a third party, called a factor, at a discount, hence freeing up liquidity in the business. I’m told that the German factoring market alone was more than 200 billion Euros in transactions last year, the largest in Europe, with a growth rate of 10 percent over the last six years.
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