Apron: London fintech taps Checkout founder and Apple iPhone co-creator for $30m funding

London fintech Apron has raised $30m (£22.4m) in Series B funding to boost hiring and launch a slew of new accounting and payment tools for small businesses.

The funding round was led by Zinal Growth, a growth-stage focused tech fund chaired by Checkout.com founder and chief executive Guillaume Pousaz.

Existing investors that participated include Index Ventures, who led Apron’s $15m (£11.2m) Series A last September, and Bessemer Venture Partners.

American tech tycoon Tony Fadell, who co-created the iPhone and iPod for Apple, also participated through his venture fund Build Collective.

Apron did not disclose at what valuation it had raised the funds.

The firm was founded in 2021 by Bogdan Uzbekov, a former product lead supporting Revolut’s European banking arm. It provides a payment management platform that consolidates invoices for small businesses to track and pay.

Apron said the latest investment would go towards expanding its engineering and product teams “ahead of significant milestones” on its roadmap for 2025.

The firm plans to launch a new product geared towards larger suppliers that issue invoices to thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), helping them eliminate the manual work of collecting revenue and get paid faster.

It added that it was working on new “affordable and accessible” expenses management product for SMEs to compliment its bill payment offering “in response to customer demand for alternatives to market incumbents”.

Apron said on Wednesday that its customer base had increased by more than 20 times since securing its Series A funding a year ago, largely due to word of mouth. It did not disclose how many customers it had.

“Every business we speak to is looking for consumer-grade quality in their B2B software. It doesn’t make sense to them that, in their personal lives, payments can be made and received instantly, but that in business the process is long-winded, siloed and not fit for purpose,” Uzbekov, Apron’s chief executive, said.

“With new investment and expertise on board, we’re excited to bring new talent into the team to innovate, design and build the sort of B2B payments experience that truly flips payments from painful to powerful.”

Pousaz said his fund was “deeply impressed by the execution and vision of Bogdan and the Apron team”, which have “created a delightful product”.

Fadell, who became a billionaire after selling Nest to Google in 2014, added: “It’s moving small businesses forward as business owners can now focus on serving their customers and spend their time actually running the business day to day.”