I’m beyond thrilled to announce that Apron has raised £12M in a Series A funding round led by Index Ventures, with participation of our existing investors, Bessemer Venture Partners and Visionaries Club. And with it, a way to radically scale up our mission to reinvent how businesses make payments.

Apron has proven itself to be a game-changer for SMBs and the boutique accountancy firms they work with. With this investment, we’ll now be able to transform the workflow for larger practices handling hundreds of clients, thousands of transactions, and billions of pounds.

As our investor at Index Ventures, Partner Jan Hammer explains:

“The needs of SMBs have been ignored for too long. Bogdan’s team have realised that if you build an amazing product, it will spread organically and at speed among small businesses and accountants. Apron have not just built a technically exceptional back-end payments platform: combined with their unique focus on the product experience for end-users, they have the potential to redefine how people pay invoices everywhere.”

How it started

We launched our beta in March 2023 to change the way businesses pay for things. Apron lets business owners and their finance partners sort, pay and reconcile invoices: with no complex onboarding, no room for error, no need for bank access and absolutely no time wasted.

How it’s going

We’ve seen staggering growth in our first few months, driven by a new wave of accountants hungry for innovation. Our next step? Make that difference, but on a dramatically larger scale. With the new funds, we’ll deepen and widen our product suite. Today, we’re announcing two major updates that will place Apron at the heart of the critical infrastructure which larger accountancy practices rely on to keep business booming.

Say hello to Apron Hub

The new home for all things payments; especially for big teams handling transactions for lots of different businesses.

Apron Hub pulls together your clients and tasks, so you can see them all in one place, and manage them in one go. Apron Hub lets you:

• Add your team members, and assign them roles and clients.
• See all pending tasks on a page. So nothing gets missed, and you can spot sticking points before they turn into roadblocks.
• Set up workflows. Let’s say there’s a standard chain of approvals that has to happen every time you pay a bill. Set up that flow in Apron Hub, and apply it to all bill payments across any number of clients — three or three-thousand.

All in all, it gives practices more oversight, making the payments process much safer and a whole lot slicker.

Coming soon: Apron Snap

Next in the pipeline is Apron Snap — a tool that captures invoices instantly and automatically. This is something our community has been crying out for, and we’ve got launch pencilled for early 2024. Here’s what Apron Snap is set to do:

• Fetch invoices from all your clients
• Snap all the invoice info
• Categorise it automatically
• Feed it into your bookkeeping software like Xero or Quickbooks

You’ll be able to pair it with the rest of Apron, or use it on its own. We see this reinventing how accountants work with clients. No more chasing for invoices. No more days-long conversations about who paid what from where. Apron Snap will reliably hoover up details from tens of thousands of invoices and feed them straight to where you need them. So you and your clients can concentrate on pushing their businesses forward, instead of pushing emails between inboxes. And we’ll price it in a way that’s reasonable and transparent.

Watch this space

These launches represent two big strides — not just for Apron, but most importantly for the 5.5 million SMBs in the UK right now. There are so many snags still needlessly slowing down millions of entrepreneurs and finance pros. We’re going to keep innovating and building, so that businesses everywhere can do the same.