Fintech Thriday lands $6 million pre-Series A led by NAB Ventures

Small business financial management platform, Thriday has raised $6 million in a pre-Series A.

The round was led by the NAB Ventures, the VC arm of the business bank, alongside “significant participation” from existing investor Lempriere Capital.

Thriday recently shifted from Beta mode to launch its platform for sole traders, amid more than 11,000 small businesses already on its access waitlist.

The fintech, previously known as Thrive, raised a record $3 million in three days in February 2021, via the equity crowdfunding platform Birchal.

Thriday cofounder and CEO Michael Nuciforo said the platform has developed a unique product that automates banking, accounting, and tax for small-to-medium businesses and has seen 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 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. This is a ground-breaking new category of product.”

Nuciforo said Australia’s 2.3 million small-to-medium businesses employ over half the country’s workforce and account for a third of GDP, but are burdened by the significant amount of time and cost involved in managing their finances.

“Research conducted by Thriday highlighted that financial admin was the most disliked activity in running a business and that business owners waste over 42 days a year in managing their financial affairs,” he said.

“Thriday solves this problem by combining a smart business account with value-added services like expense management, invoicing, tax forecasting, BAS lodgement and more. Using AI and machine learning, these tools are designed to run on autopilot, winning back time for busy business owners and making it easy for them to stay in control of their financial destiny.”

His cofounder and Thriday COO Ben Winford said they were impressed with the knowledge NAB Ventures brought to the table about the gaps in the market for SMEs.

“NAB Ventures have backed some of Australia’s fastest growing fintechs, and we feel honoured to join their portfolio of startups,” he said.

“We can’t wait to scale our platform to SMEs nationwide.”

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 business bank, we have deep customer relationships and we’re always looking at how we can be easy to deal with. Working with Thriday, we can speed things up for small business and ultimately save them time.”