It’s a fundamental challenge that confronts every business – all enterprises want to get paid more quickly. And with Allianz research suggesting some $16 trillion is now locked up in unpaid receivables at companies worldwide, the stakes are high. Fintech start-up Stuut , which is today announcing a $52.2 million Series B funding round, hopes it is therefore pushing at an open door.

“The frustrating thing about this problem is that it’s not just that companies need to get paid more quickly, but that their customers actually want to pay,” explains Tarek Alaruri, the founder and CEO of Stuut. “Typically, the problem is something small – a missing purchase order or an incorrect invoice, say – but it takes a small army of finance staff to resolve such problems at scale.”

Alaruri believes automation is the answer. Stuut says its artificial intelligence-driven platform can take over the whole order-to-cash process – the workflow in a company from receiving and order for a product and service all the way through to getting paid for it following delivery.

The idea is that Stuut’s AI agents take on much of the routine work traditionally done manually within finance. These agents use channels such as SMS, email and voice to manage tasks such as order management, credit, collection and payments, liaising with the customer. The system also learns on an ongoing basis – when a problem occurs, Stuut’s agents adds the issue to its database so that its agents automatically check for it next time there’s a similar breakdown.

The company is certainly not the only player in this segment, with a growing number of large finance software companies – as well as start-ups – claiming to be able to automate the payments process. However, Alaruri insists that Stuut’s use of AI gives the company competitive edge. “If you look at the legacy players and the first wave of accounts receivable tools, they’re essentially just offering a dashboard,” he says. They give you a read-out on the process, he argues, but that isn’t the same as taking control of it.

Certainly, the company’s early deployments appear to be generating good results. So far, the New York-based company, founded in 2023, has taken on around 150 customers, including several Fortune 500 enterprises, and moved around $3 billion of business through its platform. On average, says Alaruri, these businesses have improved their cash flow by 40% and reduced their days sales outstanding (DSO) – a key accounts receivable metric – by 47%. He says 82% of outbound collections activity at clients using Stuut’s platform is now handled automatically, rising to 95% of incoming payments.

Chris Dichiara, Chief Financial Officer at Verifone, one early Stuut customer, says the ability of the platform to plug into its existing platforms, which carry important risk controls and safeguards, is one attraction. “It respects the controls and audit trails we’ve built and gives us confidence that its AI solution can work inside those guardrails, not around them,” he explains. “It also lets us simply ask the platform what happened and why. At our scale, that matters more than speed alone.”

Stuut sees partnerships with major players in the accounting and working capital space as a shortcut to expansion. It’s already signed deals with firms including Fiserv, EY-Parthenon and HIG, and hopes to announce further deals in the months ahead. “Order-to-cash performance has always been capped by capacity: how many accounts a team can work, how many disputes it can chase,” observes Shawn Ryan, Partner and US Working Capital Leader at EY-Parthenon. “Stuut’s autonomous execution removes that ceiling while holding to the controls a global enterprise requires. That’s where agentic AI moves from promise to freeing up cash.”

The company’s latest fundraising will enable it to accelerate customer acquisition and partnership strategies, as well as to make further investments in the product. One priority is that Stuut sees invoice financing – providing credit against unpaid invoices to further support cash flow – as a natural extension of its business.

The Series B round is led by Insight Partners, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, and M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund, and takes the total amount of funding raised by the company to $93 million.

“Many enterprises have more cash tied up in receivables than they realize," says Julian Marcu, Vice President at Insight Partners, who now sits on the board at Stuut. A single invoice error can trigger weeks of follow-up across teams and systems, and at scale that adds up to real revenue left on the table."