Founded in 2021 by co-founders Joe Lines and Henry Arnold, Nook just secured €950K by a group of top-tier VCs and angel investors. The London- and Lisbon-based startup is on a mission to simplify how businesses trade together with a collaboration platform that enables businesses to exchange accounting data, enforce contracts, and manage payments. Nook is beginning by addressing the UK market.
The pre-seed round was led by Speedinvest and TriplePoint, with participation from Ascension, Notion, and angels including Michael Kent (founder of Azimo), Charlie Delingpole (founder of ComplyAdvantage and Market Invoice), and Emre Baran (founder of Qubit and Cerbos).
Nook has created the first ‘trade collaboration platform’ on a mission to disrupt the B2B payment market. They offer a solution that addresses the existing challenges in the world of B2B payments, including operating costs, errors and fraud. B2B payments have traditionally relied on PDF invoices, emails and manual data entry into bookkeeping systems, and while B2C payments have evolved rapidly over the past 30 years, the B2B payment industry has continued to be dominated by PDF documents and email.
The young company offers an alternative for B2B payments, with a platform that integrates with a business’ existing accounting software and bank accounts. It can then extract invoices and provide integrated approval and payment. Businesses can use Nook to extract invoice data from existing PDFs, or share invoices and orders directly through the platform. Using Nook will help businesses’ drive faster payment, help with debt chasing, and help with enforcement of payment terms. Customers of Xero, Quickbooks, and Sage can take advantage of Nook’s simplified invoice workflow, saving valuable time.
Nook was inspired by invoice fraud that co-founder Henry Arnold witnessed at a business he had been consulting for. The Nook founders realised that the majority of B2B payments rely on a PDF invoice and email, which is insecure and costly. Their vision is to create a trade network that ultimately replaces the need for businesses to exchange PDF documents. Today, over 50% of UK SMEs have already adopted cloud accounting solutions. Nook set out to provide a secure and effortless approach for those solutions to talk to each other.
“Business payments haven’t kept pace with the way the world works today, making them needlessly cumbersome and time-consuming,” says Olga Shikhantsova, Principal with the Speedinvest Fintech investment team. She continued: “The team at Nook have created an elegant solution to the problem, and we’re looking forward to supporting them as they bring it into the world.”
“Nook’s vision for a trade network is a compelling reinvention of the day-to-day reality that businesses face when it comes to one of their most fundamental functions: generating revenue,” says Daniel Cardenas-Clark, Investment Director at TriplePoint. “We’re excited to help Joe and Henry make that vision the new normal for B2B payments.”
The new funds acquired will enable Nook to expand its product and engineering team, to continue evolving the product, and develop sales and marketing activity with SMEs and accountants.
