Q&A with: embedded finance platform Aria

‍H Tom! What’s your elevator pitch? 

Aria provides embedded finance infrastructure for B2B platforms. We sit inside platforms and pay their suppliers within 24 hours, so that buyers keep their usual terms, the platform carries zero credit risk, and Aria handles everything in the background: KYC, credit checks, collections. Platforms get a new revenue stream on flows that already exist in their product.

Where is the business today? 

We’ve processed over €1 billion in invoice financing since launching in 2019, and we work with 50+ platforms across Europe, counting the likes of Malt, Job&Talent, and UrbanChain as clients. The UK is currently our fastest-growing market, where annual volume jumped from £1.5M to £150M between 2023 and 2025. We’ve ranked among Sifted Europe’s Fastest Growing Companies 2025 and top 100 fastest-growing startups in France and Southern Europe in 2025. Raised a €15M Series A in 2023, processing over €1 billion in invoices financed and annual revenue growth of more than 300% last year.

What made you think there was money in this?

What's wrong with your competitors?]

Aria’s founder, Clément, worked as a freelancer before starting the company, and like millions of small businesses across Europe, he regularly waited weeks, sometimes months, to be paid.

It’s a frustration most self-employed people know too well, and unfortunately, in the B2B trade, getting paid on time is the exception, not the norm. In the UK alone, late payments close down 38 businesses every day and cost the economy nearly £11 billion a year, and across Europe, €3.1 trillion sits in unpaid invoices.

Before joining Aria, I spent years at Kriya (formerly MarketFinance) as their embedded finance commercial lead, so I’d seen this gap up close and understood why the existing solutions weren’t solving the problem. Traditional factoring companies charged high fees, lenders added debt to balance sheets, and most products on the market were designed around the needs of the financier rather than the businesses waiting to be paid.

What’s your biggest strength?

It’s a combination of several things. We embed directly into the platforms businesses already use, so we get rid of any point of friction. We handle everything from KYC, KYB, and credit insurance in the background, alleviating any headaches for clients. And we achieve a 92% instant decision rate, which is unusually high for B2B lending. We also absorb the default risk entirely, so sellers carry zero credit exposure on their balance sheet. That combination is hard to replicate, and I’d say it is our main unique selling point.

Beyond the product, we also know our market well enough to be disciplined about where we focus. For example, we’re disciplined about not chasing every shiny thing. There’s a lot of pressure in fintech right now to overhaul everything with AI, and we think that’s the wrong instinct in B2B credit, because the data is rich, the ticket sizes are large, and every decision needs to be defensible to auditors and regulators. For us, it’s not a space where a black-box model earns you much. We use technology where it adds clear value, and we’re cautious where it introduces risk we don’t need to take on.

What is the secret to making the business work?

In B2B fintech, there isn’t a single secret sauce to making it work. I think it’s more about getting a lot of unsexy plumbing done right at the same time.

The hardest part hasn’t been convincing people that faster payments are good. It’s been stitching together a fragmented landscape of payment rails and funding so that the experience feels simple on the surface.

Across Europe, every country runs on different systems: BACS in the UK, separate infrastructure in France, SWIFT for cross-border. And if you get that wrong, your product looks great in a demo but falls apart when money needs to cross a border last thing on a Friday.

Infrastructure aside, a number of our team come from fintech or banking backgrounds, which means we understand the problem from the inside. That collective experience means that we are able to spend less time explaining the problem to each other and more time solving it.

How do you market the company?

We’re in the fortunate position where the product markets itself more than most, because the problem we’re solving is one that every platform operator already feels. Suppliers waiting 90 days to get paid isn’t just their problem, it affects platform retention, relationships, and reputation. That shared pain point means that conversations typically open naturally.

In those discussions, we spend a lot of time explaining the problem well in the places our buyers already trust. If we can articulate late payments, credit risk and payment rails in a way that makes a CFO or COO say “finally, someone also understands this problem,” the product demo is the easy part.

We also put our customers and partners front and centre. The strongest story isn’t “Aria grows X%”, it’s “this marketplace cut payout times from 60 days to 2 while improving risk”. When a customer explains how they fixed a shared pain, it carries far more weight than any campaign we could run.

Tell us about the business model

The business model is straightforward. We buy invoices outright and pay them within 24 hours. We then charge a transaction fee and a daily financing fee based on how long the buyer takes to settle it.

Rather than businesses having to apply through a separate portal, we are embedded in the platforms they already use and handle the compliance, credit checks, insurance, and collections in the background. By the time a supplier gets paid, most of the financial work has already been dealt with behind the scenes.

It works because everyone has a clear incentive. Suppliers get paid faster, buyers keep their flexibility, and platforms can offer their users a better experience without taking on any credit risk themselves. We take a fee on each invoice we finance and only make money when the product is being used, so we're invested in making it work for everyone.

What were you doing before?

Are there any technologies you've found useful? [software? Smartphone apps? Services etc]

Before Aria, I spent four years at Kriya, where I built out their embedded finance division from scratch. Prior to that, I worked in asset-based lending at RSM UK, and before that, I was in Singapore with the FinTech Consortium, helping launch a $100 million global fintech fund.

So I’ve seen the market from a few different angles, venture, lending, and the operational side of scaling a fintech business.

What is the future vision?

The UK is the immediate priority for us and we’ve grown faster here than anywhere else. There are a lot of platform operators we haven’t worked with yet, and we’re building a bigger team in London to change that.

Beyond that, the vision is to do more of what’s already working. Finance more invoices for more platforms, and chip away at the trillions sitting in unpaid invoices across UK and Europe that businesses are still waiting on. The opportunity is big enough that we don’t need to reinvent the wheel we just need to keep executing.

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