Is That Invoice Legit? Iridium Credit Raises $3M to Help Lenders Find Out

Iridium Credit, which has built AI software that helps financing companies check unpaid invoices, has raised $3 million in growth funding, the startup tells This Week in Fintech exclusively.

Iridium helps check that those bills are legitimate before a financing company buys them. Its software compares invoices against supporting documents and contacts customers to confirm what they owe. Once an invoice is purchased, it follows up on payment and matches incoming money to the right bill.

Iridium supplies the software – it does not buy invoices or provide financing itself.

Its customers include factoring companies that give businesses cash upfront by buying unpaid invoices at a discount. The financing company then collects payment from the customer that owes the money.

The round, co-led by Field Ventures and MGV, brings the New York-based startup’s total funding to $3.5 million since its 2025 inception. Earlier backers include Entrepreneurs First, Transpose Platform and angel investors.

Iridium was founded on the premise that the time and cost of checking invoices can limit how many businesses financing companies serve, according to Anthony Eden, Iridium’s CEO and co-founder.

“Getting a loan using the money you’re owed is very expensive,” Eden said in an interview with This Week in Fintech. “We use AI to automate that entire process, so the lending companies that offer these types of loans can do it more securely, more cheaply, and offer it to more businesses.”

A business can be owed money but still lack the cash to cover immediate expenses. A staffing agency may need to pay workers before its customers settle their bills. A manufacturer may need money for its next order while waiting for payment on the last one.

“This is a typical cash flow gap that…transportation companies, staffing companies, manufacturing companies find themselves in,” Eden said, “where they’re owed money, but they need money immediately to either cover payroll, cover immediate expenses, etc..” 

Factoring generally costs more than a bank line of credit but can be an option for businesses that cannot obtain one, noted Eden. 

“If you are a massive company, say you're Coca-Cola, you can get a bank line of credit; you don't need invoice finance,” Eden said. “But for the rest of the 90-plus percent of businesses that can't get a bank line of credit, then you default to something else. Something else right now in the U.S. looks like cash advances, where APRs can exceed 400%.”

When deciding whether to buy an invoice, the financing company considers whether the customer that owes the money is likely to pay, rather than looking only at the business selling the bill. Eden described speaking with a business that had completed work for Google and was waiting on payment for three invoices. The business wasn’t familiar with factoring until it began exploring its options.

“The ability for you to get that type of loan is based on the credibility of who owes you that money,” Eden said.

Buying an invoice can be an arduous process — a financing company needs to confirm the work was performed, the bill is legitimate and that the customer actually owes the amount claimed. That can involve comparing invoices with timesheets, purchase orders or delivery records and then calling or emailing the customer for confirmation. Manual checks cost about $22 in staff time and verify only about one in five invoices, estimates Eden. Those costs can make smaller invoices too expensive to finance. Iridium also says its software makes checking every invoice cheaper than checking a sample by hand.

Eden founded Iridium in late 2025 with chief technology officer Preesha Gehlot, whom he met at Imperial College London.

He previously helped build a payments platform at Morgan Stanley and later worked at an investment firm, helping banks, lenders and companies the firm had invested in to use software to assess borrowers and issue loans. That software was subsequently sold to outside customers and generated more than $1 million in revenue, he said.

Gehlot built software that made recommendations for Bloomberg Terminal users and worked on machine learning to detect unusual patterns at Microsoft.

The pair chose invoice financing because checking a bill requires more than reviewing documents supplied by the business seeking cash. The financing company also needs to hear from the customer expected to pay.

Iridium gathers invoices and supporting records from email, accounting software and other business systems.

“It also identifies any supporting evidence with that invoice,” Eden said. “So, a timesheet if it’s a staffing company, a purchase order if it’s a manufacturing company; it does the reconciliation to make sure the two things check out.”

The software compares amounts, dates and the businesses named in those documents. It looks for signs that documents have been altered. It also checks earlier financing records for invoices that may have already been submitted, including those presented under a different number.

It then contacts the customer that owes the money.

“It’s going to email. It’s going to phone call. It’s going to automatically log into the accounts payable system using browser agents,” Eden said.

Those “browser agents” are AI tools that navigate customers’ online payment systems. Checks of email addresses and other details help confirm who is responding. Any discrepancies are sent to a human for review, with supporting documents attached.

Financing firms and their auditors can review a record of the checks, communications and decisions. Customers can also use Iridium through existing factoring software, including FactorSoft and FactorCloud.

Iridium is working with U.S. factoring companies, although Eden did not disclose how many. He said the software processes more than 90% of the invoices at one customer without human involvement.

During one customer’s trial, Eden said Iridium found discrepancies in invoices from a business the financing company hadn’t expected to present problems. The customer questioned the findings, prompting Iridium to investigate whether its software had made a mistake. Eden said the discrepancies were real.

“So we literally found things they otherwise would have skipped,” he said.

Iridium is also developing a way for financing firms to share invoice records and spot problems they might otherwise miss, such as a business selling the same invoice to multiple buyers.

Some countries have government invoice registries, created for tax purposes, that financing companies can use to check bills, Eden said. He sees an opportunity for private companies to provide a similar source of information in the United States, which lacks a comparable national registry.

Iridium charges customers based on how many invoices it processes.

“We price on volume, so we grow with our customers,” Eden said.

Richard Kerby, co-founder and managing partner of Field Ventures, said his firm was drawn to backing Iridium because it is “applying AI to a large, mission-critical financial workflow that remains remarkably manual.” But he emphasizes that Iridium is “not simply an AI document processing tool or another factoring management system.”

Invoice financing still involves substantial manual work, from reviewing documents and confirming bills to chasing payments and matching them with invoices, noted Kerby. Those tasks add costs and leave room for fraud and mistakes. Iridium allows lenders to “verify every invoice, not just sample a portfolio,” while referring judgment-based issues to a person, he said.

Its software follows each invoice from its initial checks through payment, keeping a record of decisions along the way. It also works with lenders’ existing systems “rather than requiring a disruptive replacement.” As such, Kerby sees further potential in sharing records across lenders to detect duplicate or fraudulent invoices.