British startup Ontik, focused on automating trade credit for B2B wholesalers, has raised a €3.2 million Seed round – nearly doubling its original €1.7 million target – to bring modern financial infrastructure to sectors still reliant on manual processes.
The round was led by Firstminute Capital, with participation from PT1, Illusian, FJ Labs, Seed X, Tiny VC, and a group of strategic angels including the founders of Slack and Affirm.
“B2B wholesalers are the financial engine of the real economy—but most are still managing credit with spreadsheets, phone calls and handwritten notes,” said Chris Smith, Co-founder of Ontik. “We’re giving them modern, automated workflows that save hours every day and unlock serious operational efficiency.”
Founded by two brothers with prior exits and roots in trade, Ontik brings an operator’s insight to a problem most tech companies overlook. The company’s long-term vision is to automate the entire back office for B2B wholesalers—starting with trade credit, and expanding to the critical but time-consuming processes that hold these businesses back.
Ontik is building the “Stripe for the real economy”—automating credit and collections for wholesalers who extend payment terms to their customers. The company is starting with the €118 billion UK building materials sector, where margins are tight and back-office teams are stretched thin.
In the age of AI, trade merchants are still running a lot of their operations on pen and paper – a symptom, Ontik says, of an industry long overdue for digital transformation.
Ontik’s platform automates the order-to-cash lifecycle – from issuing payment terms and chasing invoices, to resolving disputes and syncing data back into core systems.
Merchants using Ontik report:
60%+ reduction in time spent chasing payments
30%+ faster cash collection
25%+ drop in card fees
Fewer disputes and faster resolutions
By integrating directly with major ERP systems like Merlin, Unleashed and Intact, Ontik reportedly enables rapid rollout across multi-branch operations – supporting deployment at scale across thousands of merchant locations, without disrupting existing workflows.
This automation is especially valuable in industries like construction supply, where high transaction volume meets low operating margin, and where teams are under pressure to do more with less.
“Ontik is doing for trade credit what Stripe did for online payments,” said Sam Endacott from Firstminute Capital. “They’re giving real-world businesses the tools to operate with the speed and efficiency of modern tech companies – and the impact is already clear.”
In 12 months, Ontik has gone live across over 30 branches with merchants including GH Brooks, AW Lumb, FORT and Collier & Catchpole. With over €1.1 billion in transaction volume in its pipeline and 30% month-over-month growth, Ontik continues to scale rapidly across its sector.
Read the orginal article: https://www.eu-startups.com/2025/05/london-based-fintech-startup-ontik-e1-7-million-to-become-the-stripe-for-the-real-economy/
