Parisian fintech Aria brings down the house in €15M funding round

Aria, a Parisian fintech startup offering invoice financing and B2B payments solutions, has announced the successful close of a €15 million Series A funding round. The investment is expected to propel an expansion of the company’s deferred payment infrastructure offer, with a particular focus on SaaS operators.

Frustrated and all too familiar with the process of balancing the books in terms of invoice issuance and payment delay a freelancer is oft to experience, in 2019 Aria’s co-founders and former freelancers Clement Carrier and Vincent Folny decided to take a page from the invoice factoring playbook, but reverse the direction of the relationship.

Whereas invoice factoring creates a relationship between the lender and the client, invoice financing creates a relationship between the business, in this case, the freelancer and the lender, i.e. Aria.

Building upon the success of this model, Aria is now taking things one step further and stepping up a rank from freelancer to business and facilitating relationships between two or more businesses, offering instant payments to service providers while charging a small fee for the translation.

While suppliers have access to instant payments, suppliers don’t have to stray from traditional timelines of payment, with Aria offering up to 90-day terms.

Offered as an API capable of interfacing with over 100 platforms, the service also adds on a number of securities the B2C sector has enjoyed for quite some time including KYC/KYB, debtor risk analysis, anti-fraud analysis, credit insurance, and debt recovery.

Having entered the UK market in June of this year, Aria says in the past 12 months it has processed over €500 million in payments for some 30,000 businesses and freelancers with invoices ranging anywhere from €500 to €20,000.

The company already has established partnerships with a number of freelance and marketplace outfits including Malt, Brigad, and Jump, and is backed with a €150 million facility provided by several investors including M&G Investments.

Aria’s €15 million Series A round was led by 13books Capital and saw the participation of Adevinta Ventures, Ankaa Ventures, and Otium Capital as well as several angel investors including Voodoo founder Laurent Ritter, former Apax Partners managing director Mark Ransford, and former Stripe executive and current Mooncard CEO Guillaume Princen.

Lead image: Aria co-founders Clement Carrier and Vincent Folny (left to right). Photo: Uncredited.