The single most accurate way to describe the payment problem facing small and medium businesses in the United Kingdom is statistical: according to research Adfin cites, 63 percent of invoices sent by UK SMEs are paid late. Nearly two‑thirds of all the money that small businesses are legally owed arrives after it was due, creating the cash flow pressure that limits hiring, suppresses investment, and in some cases ends businesses that should have survived.

Adfin, the London‑based fintech founded in 2024 by payments veterans Tom Pope and Ciprian Diaconasu, claims its customers see only 9 percent of invoices paid late. That is not a modest improvement over the market average. It is a seven‑times better outcome. And it is the central commercial claim that convinced Index Ventures to lead an $18 million Series A round in a company that has been operating for less than two years.

On May 12, 2026, Adfin announced the round alongside its second place ranking as one of the fastest‑growing technology companies in Europe, per Scaling Europe's annual list, specifically as the fastest‑growing UK company in the ranking. In under two years, the company has scaled to serve more than 1,500 businesses across the UK, spanning accounting firms, law practices, and professional services companies in the trades and care sectors.

How Adfin Creates the 7x Difference

The mechanism behind Adfin's late payment improvement is architectural rather than behavioral. Most businesses that struggle with late payments have tried following up on invoices more diligently. They know the problem. They do not have a systematic solution that works consistently at scale.

Adfin pairs proprietary payment infrastructure with agentic AI workflows that operate on behalf of its customers. The combination is the critical distinction. Payment infrastructure alone, a new way to send or receive payments, does not solve the follow‑up problem. AI workflows alone, built on top of standard bank rails, lack the speed, reliability, and data richness that make intelligent follow‑up decisions possible.

By owning both layers simultaneously, Adfin's system determines the optimal follow‑up action for each unpaid invoice in real time, choosing between email nudge, SMS reminder, direct payment link, or human escalation based on the invoice age, payer behavior history, relationship type, and payment amount. The decisions are made at machine speed and machine volume, covering every invoice simultaneously rather than the subset that an overworked finance team gets to in between other priorities.

Tom Pope's description of the platform's direction reflects an ambition that extends well beyond invoice collection: "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."

The phrase "in time, much more" is the strategic signal. Adfin's current product is invoice collection and payment reconciliation. Its stated direction is end‑to‑end cashflow management, encompassing how a business receives money, holds it, deploys it for expenses, and anticipates future needs. The invoice collection capability is the wedge. The agentic finance platform for money movement is the destination.

Who Backed the Round and Why

Index Ventures led this round, following their earlier participation in Adfin's seed. Index is one of the most selective and most respected enterprise software investors in Europe and the US, with a portfolio including Robinhood, Datadog, Figma, Glossier, and dozens of other scaled technology companies. Their decision to lead rather than follow‑on is a specific signal about conviction.

Visionaries Club returns as a participating investor. New investors include Stéphane Kurgan, the former COO of King, the mobile gaming company best known for Candy Crush Saga, who brings direct operational experience managing payment flows at consumer internet scale; and Andrey Khusid, the founder of Miro, the collaborative visual platform used by tens of millions of professional users globally.

The angel investor profile, operators who have managed complex payment and financial workflows at scale in consumer technology environments, reflects something specific about Adfin's market thesis: the problems it is solving for professional services SMEs share structural characteristics with the payment and reconciliation challenges that consumer internet companies scaled through years earlier. Khusid and Kurgan have seen what an agentic layer on top of financial infrastructure can accomplish.

The $18 million funds expansion of the product into end‑to‑end cashflow management, accelerated hiring across engineering and sales, and preparation for international expansion beyond the UK. The market Adfin is building toward is not limited to British professional services firms with late payment problems. The SME payment problem is structurally similar in Germany, France, Spain, and the US, and Adfin's architecture, proprietary payment rails plus intelligent agentic workflows, is designed to operate across payment systems rather than being dependent on UK‑specific infrastructure.

More at adfin.com