Fresh from luring €1.1 million, Madrid's Snab is growing its centralised B2B payments platform

Madrid-based Snab has raised €1.1 million in pre-seed funds from investors including Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator.

The round was also backed by 4Founders Capital, Glenfarne Group, and the founders of startups Kantox and Belvo, among others. It's intended to fund forward activity on Snab's SME fintech platform for automating, digitising and streamlining B2B payments.

Snab's cloud-hosted B2B payments and cash management platform is claimed to automate end-to-end SME invoice collection. To support better management of SME finances, the platform also rolls up integrated banking for payments and real time transaction visibility.

What's interesting is Snab's deployment of optical character recognition (OCR), which allows SMEs to automate receipt of invoices for paying suppliers. OCR is a form of computer vision that, in this case, is trained to automatically scan text data on manual invoices, allowing relevant figures to be extracted without manual data entries.

Snab's software actions OCR invoice entries via a dedicated email address; each invoice is screened as soon as it enters the mailing inbox.

Automation then hands over to human accountants to compile invoices for scheduling outgoing transactions, limiting menial admin that can delay supplier payments and conceal the SME's true financial position.

Snab says roughly 90% of Spanish SMEs want to modernise manual cash management processes. Given that SMEs comprise 98% of the Spanish business market, the use of antiquated bookkeeping acts as an enormous concave for business growth, according to Gorka Aguirre, Snab co-founder and CEO.

"During my last professional experience in New York City I learned first-hand the difficulties businesses are facing in the areas of finance and treasury," Aguirre said. "Digitisation contributes to the improvement and professionalization of business management. Processes are optimized, errors are reduced, and, in addition, scalability is generated because employees themselves can devote more time to tasks that create greater value, while substantially increasing their well-being in the workplace."