Fluidly, the ‘intelligent’ cashflow management SaaS for SMEs, picks up £5M Series A

Fluidly, the London-based fintech that offers an “intelligent” cashflow management SaaS for SMEs, has raised £5 million in Series A funding. The round is led by New-York based Nyca Partners, with participation from other investors including Octopus Ventures, Anthemis, and angel investors Simon Murdoch, and Charlie Songhurst.

Claiming to define a new software category, namely “Intelligent Cash,” Fluidly want to significantly improve small and medium-sized businesses’ cashflow management. To do this it has built machine learning-based technology to predict and optimise the future cash flows for SMEs, thus helping business owners conduct better financial decision-making. As part of this, you connect Fluidly to your business bank account via Open Banking, and to your cloud accounting software.

“Fluidly is then able to access the transaction-level bank and accounting data and it uses this data to automatically forecast future cash flows by predicting when invoices will arrive, get paid or other payments will be made,” explains co-founder and CEO Caroline Plumb. “This gives a business an instant, continuously updated view of their financial future rather than having to model it in a spreadsheet”.

Since launching a year ago, Fluidly says it is now working with nine of the top twenty U.K. accounting firms as a route to market, including BDO, Baldwins, and Haysmacintyre. The fintech has also formed partnerships with various cloud accounting software providers, and says it is one of the fastest-growing apps on Xero’s marketplace and a “Champion-level” Sage partner.

To that end, businesses sign up for Fluidly on a monthly subscription basis, and Fluidly also sells volume licences to accounting firms and lenders who then in turn offer the SaaS to their own small business clients. Futrli, and Float could be considered competitors, but arguably the humble Excel spreadsheet is Fluidly’s main competitor and a far from optimum solution.

Meanwhile, Plumb tells me the new funding will be invested in product development and engineering to increase the number of platforms that Fluidly can integrate with, and to add new features such as scenario-building and insights to the software’s forecasting ability.

“We’ll be adding smart alerts, scenarios and suggested actions if you might be running into cashflow difficulty,” she says. “We’ll also start to scale our sales and marketing team”.

Adds Hans Morris, Managing Partner at Nyca: “We are thrilled to have joined Fluidly on their journey as they grow into a major AI/ ML player in the financial technology industry. Cashflow management for SME’s is an area that is long overdue for the kind of innovation that Fluidly is providing”.