Floodlight Raises $6.4 Million for ‘Smart Business Account for eCommerce’

Floodlight has raised $6.4 million in a seed round to expand its “smart business account for eCommerce.”

The United Kingdom-based company’s account enables eCommerce small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to manage their finances and gain financial insights through a single dashboard that connects the financial platforms they use, Floodlight said in a Monday (April 17) press release emailed to PYMNTS.

“By providing a seamless financial management solution, we help [SMBs] overcome their daily challenges while unlocking opportunities to set themselves up for long-term growth,” Floodlight Co-founder and CEO Noam Bernstein said in the release. “They can better serve their international customers, employees and providers, and ultimately create more value for their businesses.”

As PYMNTS reported Wednesday (April 12), Open Banking Limited (OBL) said the adoption of open banking has surged among SMBs in the U.K., with small business use largely “dominated by data-driven account information services (AIS). which allow firms to see multiple accounts in one place, providing valuable real-time insights for cash flow and forecasting.”

About 750,000 SMBs are using open banking products today, representing a penetration rate of 16%, and they are especially interested in cloud accounting software that imports transaction data using open banking, according to OBL.

Floodlight helps eCommerce entrepreneurs manage and optimize their finances by tackling the challenge of siloed financial data, in which their data is spread across bank accounts, their eCommerce store and other sources, according to the press release.

Along with bringing this data together in one dashboard, Floodlight reports on cash flow trends, provides access to financial coaching from a customer success team and enables access to banking services and Floodlight Debit Mastercards, the release said.

“We are building a covenant with entrepreneurs that we are here to help them increase their financial resilience and build great businesses,” Michael Eisenberg, equal partner at Aleph, which led the funding round together with 83 North, said in the release.

These solutions arrive at a time when small business loans are becoming harder and more expensive to get in the U.K. In addition, the interest rates on the loans that are offered to small businesses have risen.

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