Melbourne, Australia – Thrive, an AI-powered fintech aimed at small and medium enterprises (SMEs), has announced the initial stages of its crowdfunding, targeting A$3M, on the equity crowdfunding platform Birchal.
The crowdfunding comes after the platform’s interest in launching the Thrive app for its SME waitlist, which has numbered over 7,500 businesses.
According to Thrive’s data, financial admin has been the most disliked activity in running a business and that business owners waste over 42 days a year in managing their financial affairs. This is something that the platform aims to solve by automating banking, accounting tasks, and lending for SMEs.
Furthermore, Thrive combines a smart business account with value-added services like receipt scanning, invoicing, tax forecasting, payroll, and more. Using artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), 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.
“We have been running a number of focus groups with small business owners as we put the finishing touches on our product. After we kept getting asked about investment, we decided that we couldn’t think of anything better than to allow our potential customers to become investors in the business as well,” said Michael Nuciforo, co-founder & CEO of Thrive.
Meanwhile, Thrive Co-founder and COO Ben Winford added, “We were really impressed with the Birchal team and platform. We can’t wait to launch our campaign and to get our members behind us. Crowdfunding presents an exciting opportunity to build our brand, grow our member base and build further advocacy for our business.”