Anchor automates B2B payments

By Edlyn Cardoza

Anchor is an autonomous billing platform that connects businesses and their clients through a ‘live online agreement’ that serves as a single source of truth. Anchor’s autonomous end-to-end billing and payments solution covers the entire cycle: starting with the vendor and client agreement and managing the invoicing, payment, and reconciliation steps. This automation frees businesses of all sizes to focus on doing billable work instead of the time-consuming and costly manual work involved in trying to get paid on time.

In December 2021, Anchor completed a $15 million seed-funding round led by Rapyd with participation from Entree Capital.

Anchor integrates with the client’s payment information and with the service provider’s tech stack, so once the service is delivered, or upon the billing due date, the invoices are automatically populated and sent according to the agreement and deliverables. Once payments are released, Anchor automates the collections and reconciliation.

According to a report by Dun & Bradstreet, cash flow issues caused 90% of small business failures in 2019. Surprisingly, 60% of these businesses were profitable but couldn’t handle the negative cash-flow gap caused mostly by late payments. Today, billing and collections are labour-intensive, expensive, time-consuming, error-prone, and subject to fraud risk. This systemic failure is caused by the inherent manual labour in every billing cycle. Anchor completely automates the billing process, ensuring every business is paid on time and effortlessly.

“The challenges of billing and collections, which make paying a vendor a hefty process, stem from the human element,” says Rom Lakritz, Co-founder & CEO of Anchor. “If people could trust the invoices they receive from service providers just like they trust machine-generated invoices from their Spotify and Amazon accounts, billing and payments would no longer be a painful process, and cash would easily flow in a market estimated at over $120 trillion annually.”