Thriday, a small business financial management platform, has raised $6 million in a pre-Series A.
The round was led by NAB Ventures, the investment bank’s VC arm, alongside “significant participation” from existing investor Lempriere Capital.
Thriday recently moved from beta mode to launch its sole proprietorship platform, amid more than 11,000 small businesses already on the waiting list for access.
The fintech, formerly known as Thrive, raised a record $3 million in three days in February 2021 through equity crowdfunding platform Birchal.
Thriday co-founder and CEO Michael Nuciforo said the platform has developed a unique product that automates banking, accounting and tax for small to medium sized businesses and there is huge national demand from those business owners.
“We created Thriday to simplify the lives of small business owners,” he said.
“By combining banking, accounting and tax in one solution, we have built the first all-in-one financial management platform, fundamentally redesigning how small businesses manage their financial administration and save them hours per week. This is a groundbreaking new product category.”
Nuciforo said Australia’s 2.3 million small to medium-sized businesses employ more than half of the country’s workforce and account for a third of GDP, but are burdened by the significant amount of time and expense involved in developing manage their finances.
“Thriday’s research found that accounting was the most unpleasant activity in running a business and that business owners waste more than 42 days a year managing their finances,” he said.
“Thriday solves this problem by combining a smart business account with value-added services such as expense management, invoicing, tax forecasting, BAS reporting and more. Using AI and machine learning, these tools are designed to run on autopilot, helping busy entrepreneurs save time and make it easy for them to control their financial fate.”
Its co-founder and Thriday COO Ben Winford said they were impressed with the knowledge NAB Ventures brought forth about the gaps in the market for SMBs.
“NAB Ventures has supported some of Australia’s fastest growing fintechs and we are honored to join their portfolio of startups,” he said.
“We can’t wait to scale our platform to SMBs across the country.”
NAB Group Executive, Business and Private Banking, Andrew Irvines said Thriday is a great fit for the bank.
Time is gold for small business owners, especially when it comes to managing finances,” he said.
“As Australia’s leading investment bank, we have deep customer relationships and we are always looking for how to easily deal with. By working with Thriday, we can speed things up for small businesses and ultimately save them time.”