Iridium raises USD $3 million to automate invoice checks

Iridium Credit has raised USD $3 million in a funding round co-led by Field Ventures and MGV. The money will support its invoice verification business for US factors.

The New York-based company checks invoices financed by lenders against source documents, confirms them with debtors, and tracks them through collections and cash posting. Its goal is to replace a manual process that leaves many receivables unchecked because of the labour involved.

Iridium says a manual verification check costs a factor about USD $22 in staff time, so typically only around one in five invoices is reviewed. Smaller invoices may be left outside the system altogether. Another common shortcut is to confirm only that an invoice has been posted to a debtor ledger, a process that can take two to three weeks.

It argues that these gaps have limited the development of invoice finance in the US. The market amounts to about 2% of GDP in the US, compared with 14% in Chile, where a government electronic invoicing registry means invoices arrive already verified.

Market losses

The company tied the need for more comprehensive verification to recent losses in the sector. First Brands filed for bankruptcy with USD $2.3 billion in factoring liabilities, while Point Bonita Capital, part of Jefferies' Leucadia Asset Management, disclosed roughly USD $715 million of exposure tied to factoring First Brands invoices owed by retailers including Walmart, AutoZone, and O'Reilly.

A court-appointed examiner found that lenders buying those receivables typically did not see the underlying invoices or verify the data against invoices held in First Brands' own database. The case has drawn attention to how much of the factoring market still relies on manual sampling rather than full document review.

Iridium says its software reads documents submitted with an invoice, such as rate confirmations, bills of lading, timesheets, and purchase orders, then checks whether amounts, dates, and parties match. It also screens invoices against previously funded items to identify possible duplicate submissions or the same invoice presented under a different number.

The process extends beyond the initial check. Before funding, the software sends notices of assignment, seeks written acknowledgement, and confirms that debtors have changed remit-to details in their own systems. It then tracks collections and matches incoming cash to invoices. Any failed check is passed to a person, with the discrepancy and supporting documents highlighted.

"100% verification samples should be the standard for modern lenders with AI. This lets the focus shift to the exceptions," said Robert P. Grbic, Managing Partner at Bearbrook Corporate Advisors LLC.

Iridium says its system works with lenders' existing platforms, including FactorSoft and FactorCloud, rather than replacing them. At one factor, the platform handles more than 90% of invoices without human intervention.

"Invoice finance has only reached a fraction of its potential because the manual operations underneath it are not scalable," said Anthony Eden, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Iridium.

"Instead of laborious sampling, every invoice should be systematically verified, with a full audit trail and a human in the loop for the judgment calls. That's the infrastructure we're building," Eden said.

Backers and plans

MGV says the investment reflects its view that verification remains a bottleneck in a larger credit market. The funding will be used to expand deployment across US invoice finance lenders and to develop what Iridium describes as a payment intelligence network that pools verification and payment data across industries.

Iridium says cross-market data could help detect fraud patterns that an individual lender would not spot on its own. It adds that banks, private credit funds, and specialist platforms entering the market are likely to require more detailed verification and payment records before committing more capital.

Iridium was founded in 2025 by Eden and Chief Technology Officer Preesha Gehlot. Eden previously worked on automated credit underwriting for banks and private credit funds at a global alternative asset manager and helped build a payments platform at Morgan Stanley. Gehlot previously worked on recommendation models for the Bloomberg Terminal and anomaly-detection machine learning at Microsoft.

Alongside Field Ventures and MGV, Iridium is backed by Entrepreneurs First, Transpose Platform, and a group of strategic angel investors. It operates from New York and also has a team in London.

Industry advisers say the shift from manual checking to broader automation could alter the economics of factoring if lenders gain confidence that smaller invoices and larger books can be reviewed more consistently. The question for the market is whether wider adoption of automated verification can reduce the fraud and credit losses that have exposed weaknesses in traditional controls.

"Invoice finance should be one of the largest credit markets in the country, but it has been constrained by the manual bottleneck of verification, and the losses of the past year are what that bottleneck costs," said Marc Schröder, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at MGV.

"With Iridium, verification stops being rationed, so the amount of capital that can safely enter this market grows," Schröder said.