Why Octopus Ventures invested in Comma

Our Investment in Comma

The SME Payment Challenge

• Small businesses spend over 137 million hours sending over £1 trillion of payments online – primarily payroll and invoices.
• The vast majority of SMEs have less than ten employees and no corporate banking function.

• Paying these invoices and payroll runs is a largely manual process and costs the economy billions in time alone.

Comma’s Innovative Solution

• Comma is a native open banking bulk payment system that saves clients the tedious work of paying bills, salaries and taxes.

• Comma is initially being distributed through accountants who can set up payment runs for their clients and allow them to authorise all the payments in one click.

• Comma is also working with some of the largest bookkeeping platforms with the goal of becoming the Stripe for salary payments.

• Comma is one of the most exciting fintechs we have come across building on top of the existing open banking rails.

 

Leadership and Vision

 

Tom Beckenham is a second time founder having built a profitable tech business in the UK before Comma. He has also brought on some fantastic early investors such as Peter Briffet and Portman Wills from Wagestream and Village Global.

Conclusion

Since our investment in token.io we have become passionate about backing founders building on top of the open banking rails, particularly for B2B use cases.

We are excited to put our Talent team to work as Tom looks to significantly scale up the team to meet the growing demand for Comma

 

You can read the rest of “Why we invested in” collection here:

See the collection