Moncton’s SnapAP Completes First Phase Of $2-Million Funding Round
MONCTON – Fintech company SnapAP has completed the first stages of a planned $2-million (U.S.) seed round led by angel investors in Israel.
Co-founder and COO Sionne Roberts said the full funding round is expected to close in the first quarter of 2021, but “a significant portion” of it is already on hand. He said the funds will be used to boost sales and marketing effort for SnapAP.
“We’re certainly going to continue to maintain innovative status with future enhancements to be competitive in the market, but the purpose of raising the money was to go and grow revenue,” he said. “So that’s marketing, customer success, sales. We have a very interesting sales relationship with Oracle that we want to support very properly.”
This marks the first-ever capital funding deal with primarily Israeli investors for a fintech startup in Atlantic Canada. Israel had gone into a lockdown in the middle of the fundraising process, said Roberts, but SnapAP managed to do all the pitching, negotiating and legal processes remotely.
“The fact that we can still proceed in the face of Covid-19 challenges – it’s a lot of work to get over that hurdle, but that’s something that we want to signal from the market that people can persevere and there are still positive stories in the face of these difficult challenges that people are facing,” he said.
Also known as Snap Accounts Payable Corporation, the company provides a cloud-based platform that streamlines financial operations for companies from procurement to payment processing. The company says its platform can boost the efficiency of accounts payable staff in a company up to 10 times, and cut the average cost of processing a payable invoice by up to 90 percent.
SnapAP has more than 50,000 active buyer-side and supplier-side users monthly and is an approved partner of global tech company Oracle. It facilitates the processing of more than $200 million a year in payments between its users and their suppliers and vendors globally. The company has also launched a mobile app version of its platform for Andoid, iOS and Windows.
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“At the outset of learning what the SnapAP team had built, the opportunities that they had in the fintech space were clear,” said Venn Innovation’s entrepreneur-in-residence and fintech entrepreneur Alicia Roisman Ismach in a release. “The recognition of the strategies for growth that could be implemented in SnapAP and the clear value that they bring to their clients allowed for their introduction to global investors who are very familiar with this vertical.”
Roberts said Ismach, who was part of the industry in Israel when fintech was blooming, played a big role in helping them raise this round.
She connected them with her network in New York, Silicon Valley and Israel, and helped the SnapAP team manage different time zones and cultures.
Roberts said the support of Atlantic Fintech, Venn Innovation, Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency, Business Development Bank of Canada, Opportunities NB, Propel, New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, Innovacorp and New Brunswick-based angel investors were key to its success.
“We would not be where we are today without the valued support to-date of several key parties within the regional startup ecosystem,” he said.
SnapAP is finalizing new channel sales distribution partnerships that will be announced early next year. It’s new Israeli investors also plan to use their connections to get the software adopted by high-profile banking and manufacturing companies internationally.