Australian fintech Thriday has landed a $6 million pre-Series A funding round led by the venture arm of National Australia Bank, NAB Ventures.
The round also included significant participation from existing investor Lempriere Capital and follows a $3 million crowdfunding campaign by Thriday in March of last year.
Thriday has developed an all-in-one platform which uses artificial intelligence to automate banking, accounting and tax for small-to-medium businesses, which the firm’s co-founder and CEO Michael Nuciforo described as “ground-breaking”.
“By combining banking, accounting and tax into one solution, we’ve built the first all-in-one financial management platform, fundamentally redesigning how small businesses manage their financial admin and saving them hours each week,” he said.
With Australia’s 2.3 million SMEs employing over half of the country’s workforce and accounting for a third of its GDP, research by Thriday has found that the owners of these businesses waste more than 42 days a year managing their financial affairs.
To combat this challenge, Thriday said that it has combined a smart business account with value-added services such as expense management, invoicing, tax forecasting and BAS lodgement, which are all intended to run on autopilot thanks to AI and machine learning.
Commenting on the investment, NAB group executive, business and private banking, Andrew Irvine, said that the bank has a deep relationship with its customers and is always looking for ways to be easier to deal with.
“Working with Thriday, we can speed things up for small businesses and ultimately save them time — this is a great fit for NAB Ventures and we’re looking forward to working with the founders on their journey,” he said.
Thriday co-founder & COO, Ben Winford, added that the fintech was impressed with NAB Ventures’ knowledge about the gap in the market that currently exists for SMEs.
“NAB Ventures have backed some of Australia’s fastest growing fintechs, and we feel honoured to join their portfolio of start-ups. We can’t wait to scale our platform to SMEs nationwide,” he said.
