Now, a FinTech startup co-founded by political firebrand Stacey Abrams, has announced that they’ve raised $9.5 million in their latest Series A funding round.
According to TechCrunch, the company — originally called Nourish — was founded by Abrams and Lara O’Connor Hodgson in 2010 and specifically addresses the issues of helping small businesses get paid.
A business submits an invoice to Now, which pays 100 percent of the invoice’s value. Now then takes a 3 percent service fee for paying the invoice, and the total is then recouped when the vendor pays (which can take up to 80 days, according to the company).
“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,” Stacey Abrams said to TechCrunch. “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.”
The Georgia-based company’s Series A funding round led by Virgo Investment Group featuring Cresset Capital Partners, will be used to help scale Now’s offerings.
Ultimately, too, Now’s original incarnation as Nourish is what inspired Stacey Abrams to pivot the company’s focus. Nourish provided child-care and baby services to working mothers. However, she said, they were the victim of bad planning and a lack of knowledge of the industry. And when their failure to collect on their invoices led to them shuttering the company altogether, Now was born.
“Finally, unfortunately, we had to let our business [Nourish] die. We grew to death. We got too big to meet the needs and didn’t have a solution,” Abrams said, while adding that Now was the far better, and more stable, solution.
