British fintech firm Rimilia raises $15m to boost AI payments business

A British fintech firm which uses artificial intelligence to automate payments has raised $15m from investors as it looks to fuel the growth of its business. 

Rimilia, a fintech firm founded in Bromsgrove in 2008, has raised money in a growth round involving a string of existing investors, including Eight Road Ventures, a London-headquartered venture capital firm that was an early backer in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, Silicon Valley Bank and Kennett Partners.

The company uses artificial intelligence to help clients speed up the usually laborious and manual work required to process payments from customers. In 2019, its technology help automate  the collection of £110bn ($145bn). 

According to Kevin Kimber, chief executive of Rimilia, whose fintech start-up works with the likes of Disney, HSBC and Royal Mail, many companies spend months collecting cash from customers, leaving them millions of pounds out of pocket for longer than necessary. 

“We’re helping these businesses automate their accounts receivable function – so fundamentally how they get paid,” he said. 

“Typically these large global corporates are still largely managing this process manually with spreadsheets and so there’s very little predictability or control.”

Mr Kimber has previously worked to scale technology businesses having taken ServiceNow, a US cloud computing firm, to the public markets at a $4bn valuation in June 2012. 

The float in New York was the first major initial public offering by a technology company after Facebook’s listing in May 2012. The company now has a $60bn market capitalisation.

The fintech chief executive, who joined the firm in 2018, said companies are searching for ways to free up staff from “fairly mundane and manual tasks that we as humans don’t want to deal with”.

The company currently has offices in the UK, US and Canada and hires around more than 140 people.