After co-founding Insomnia Consulting, Stacey Abrams and Lara O’Connor Hodgson began Nourish to deal with a private downside.
“We were at a meeting, I think for one of my campaigns,” explains Abrams, the Georgia-based lawyer and politician whose voting rights work grew to become a focus for the nation in 2020. “[O’Connor Hodgson] needed to put together a baby bottle and had to trust the waiter to take the bottle back and wash it. She said, ‘I just wish there was a Dasani for babies.’ ”
Ultimately, nonetheless, Nourish bumped into a problem. The firm was a sufferer of its personal successes, to listen to Abrams describe it — or, extra precisely, a sufferer of a system that didn’t present it the proper instruments to develop. An issue with invoicing finally stopped the childcare in its tracks. But it was exactly these failings that planted the seed for his or her subsequent firm, the merely named Now.
“We started looking for a loan. All we needed was the money to meet the order. This was during the credit crunch, and we could not get it,” Abrams tells TechCrunch. “We went from bank to credit union to factoring, and every time we got near the end, the credit model changed and we got kicked out of the program. Finally, unfortunately, we had to let our business die. We grew to death. We got too big to meet the needs and didn’t have a solution.”
Abrams and O’Connor Hodgson based Now in 2010 to supply small companies a faster technique for getting invoices paid. When a enterprise submits an bill by way of NowAccount, the service pays 100% of the bill, minus a 3% service provider charge.
Image Credits: Now
“We sell bonds in the capital market, just like American Express does,” O’Connor Hodgson explains. “We have very low-cost capital that we’re able to give that small business their revenue immediately. And then we’ve built a system that allows us to manage the cost and risk of that, because we’re going to then wait 30+ days to get paid.”
Today the Georgia-based firm introduced that it has raised $9.5 million in Series A funding. The spherical, led by Virgo Investment Group and that includes Cresset Capital Partners, will likely be used to assist scale Now’s choices. It comes because the pandemic has put much more of a pressure on invoices for a lot of corporations. O’Connor Hodgson says the typical wait time for bill fee expanded from round 50 days to between 70-80.
“We have served over 1,000 small businesses and we have processed over $700 million in transactions,” says O’Connor Hodgson. “So that’s $700 million of their capital that they have received sooner.”
Thus far, Now’s development has largely been a product of phrase of mouth. The new inflow of funding will go, partly, to market and promoting to get the product in entrance of extra small companies.
“When you’re a small business and someone tells you we have a solution to a problem that no one has been willing to solve, we sound like magic,” says Abrams. “And what we want people to understand and a big part of our scaling challenge has been, you have to experience it to believe it. And getting companies to understand that this actually does work the way we say that it does actually benefit you in the way we imagine, and that it works.”
