B2B payments startup Nook raises pre-seed funding of $1.1m

Nook has created the first trade collaboration platform that overhauls the established, outdated world of B2B payments, which rely on PDF invoices, emails, and manual data entry into bookkeeping systems. Today businesses suffer considerable operating costs, errors and fraud just to do business with their suppliers and customers. While B2C payments have evolved rapidly over the past 30 years solving the pains and security issues that they initially faced. B2B payment has stubbornly remained underpinned by PDF documents and email.

Instead, Nook’s platform integrates seamlessly with a business’ existing accounting software and bank accounts. It automatically extracts invoices and provides integrated approval and payment. Nook also supports extracting invoice data from PDFs, but businesses experience the full benefits when they share invoices and orders directly over Nook. This helps drive faster payment, debt chasing, and enforcement of payment terms. Today Xero, Quickbooks, and Sage customers can take advantage of Nook’s simplified invoice workflow, saving hours of manual data entry.

Co-founders Joe Lines and Henry Arnold began building Nook at the start of 2021, inspired by invoice fraud Henry witnessed at a business he had been consulting for. “This got us thinking deeply about how invoice fraud happens to businesses,” says Joe. “We realised that the majority of B2B payments rely on a PDF invoice and email, which is insecure and costly. Our vision is to create a trade network that ultimately replaces the need for businesses to exchange PDF documents.

Nook is beginning by addressing the UK market. “Today, over 50% of UK SMEs have already adopted cloud accounting solutions. It’s time that we have a secure and effortless approach for those solutions to talk to each other,” says Lines.

The pre-seed round was led by Speedinvest and TriplePoint, with participation from Ascension, Notion, and angels including fintech founders, Michael Kent (founder of Azimo), Charlie Delingpole (founder of ComplyAdvantage and Market Invoice), and Emre Baran (founder of Qubit and Cerbos).

Nook will use the new funds to expand its product and engineering team, continue to evolve the product, and begin sales and marketing activity with SMEs and accountants.

“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. “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.”