Monk raises USD $25 million to tackle invoice delays

Monk has raised USD $25 million in a Series A round co-led by Footwork and Acrew, with participation from BTV.

The New York-based accounts receivable software company said the funding comes as it targets what it calls a large, underserved segment of business finance. Monk helps companies collect payments and manage overdue invoices by identifying why bills have not been paid.

Its founders argue that many overdue invoices are not simply the result of slow-paying customers. Payment is often delayed because invoices do not reach the right contact, are rejected by customer procurement portals, or contain missing purchase order details and other errors.

Monk has built its product around what it calls "intelligent collections", a system designed to distinguish between behavioural non-payment and structural problems in the billing process. The software aims to determine whether a customer has chosen not to pay or whether an invoice has been misdirected, rejected, or left unresolved before any follow-up is sent.

The software integrates with accounts payable portals used by large companies, including Coupa and Ariba, as well as other Fortune 500 payment systems. It handles submission rules, field mapping, and validation checks, and flags failed invoice submissions so finance teams can correct them quickly.

Market gap

Monk positions itself in a part of enterprise finance software that has drawn less attention than enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, and accounts payable automation. It says accounts receivable in the US amounts to USD $3 trillion, yet much of the collections process still relies on manual follow-ups, spreadsheet-based reconciliation, and staff time spent resolving disputes or checking invoice status.

That pitch reflects a broader push by software companies to apply large language models and automation to administrative workflows involving unstructured documents, fragmented communication, and repeated exceptions. In receivables, those exceptions can include invoice delivery failures, contact changes within customer finance teams, portal-specific formatting rules, and purchase order disputes.

Additional material from Monk criticises older accounts receivable systems as being built around a fixed sequence of invoice creation, sending, reminders, and escalation. The company argues that this approach assumes an invoice was delivered successfully and then ignored, when in practice, many invoices are delayed because they never entered a payable workflow at all.

That distinction matters for companies selling to large enterprises, where procurement and payment are often handled through specialised systems with their own submission requirements. A missing field, an incorrect file format, or an absent reference number can prevent an invoice from entering the customer's process, even when the sender's system records it as sent.

Customer claims

Monk says customers using its software have seen a 40% reduction in days sales outstanding, a 24% higher collections response rate, and 26 hours of time savings per month. It did not disclose its number of customers, revenue, valuation, or how the new capital will be allocated.

The company also says it combines invoice creation and collections tracking rather than treating them as separate functions. According to Monk, the software reads contract terms such as milestones, recurring payment schedules, usage-based pricing, and multiple currencies, then tracks invoices through delivery, receipt, and payment. George Kurdin and Joe Zhou co-founded the business. Kurdin previously worked at D.E. Shaw, Minecraft, and Streamlabs, while Zhou held engineering roles at Google and Snap.

By focusing on the causes of payment delays rather than relying on repeated reminders, Monk is betting finance teams want software that can identify broken invoice workflows before they become collections problems. It argues that long ageing reports often reflect operational failures as much as customer reluctance to pay.

Monk said: "Customers see a 40% reduction in DSO, a 24% higher collections response rate, and 26 hours a month back in time savings."