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Hokodo has been awarded a €2-million Horizon 2020 grant from the European Union’s Innovation Council.
Awarded to Hokodo's Paris office, the funds will help us roll-out our ground-breaking technology-led financial services to help protect B2B trade across Europe – including B2B Buy Now, Pay Later, invoice protection insurance and our best-in-class credit algorithm, Hokoscore.
The European Innovation Council, run by the European Commission, aims to support innovators “developing and commercialising new products, services and business models that could drive economic growth and shape new markets in Europe and worldwide”.
Our simple and accessible financial products made Hokodo a perfect fit.
On-demand invoice insurance and customer credit checks
Hokodo designs and distributes insurance and finance solutions for B2B businesses. Our Invoice Protection solution helps small and medium sized firms protect themselves against late payment and non-payment of their invoices.
Hokodo can be accessed through the digital tools many SMEs already use, including cloud accounting software, B2B marketplaces, invoice financing platforms, and neobanks like Countingup in the UK.
Customers can protect themselves right when they need to – accepting a purchase order or raising an invoice. Everything’s automated, accessible through an API, and easy for our partners to integrate within their own websites, tools, and marketplaces.
We’re also rolling out Hokoscore, which will allow our partners to check their clients’ creditworthiness, giving companies the confidence to trade with longer credit terms, making trade within the EU easier. Hokoscore will be accessible in 5 countries in the next 18 months, which would have been unimaginable without this valuable funding from the EIC.
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Hokodo gives small businesses access to financial services that were previously designed purely for large corporates. Now, smaller businesses can keep themselves protected from late and non-payment too, through simple digital services they’re already familiar with.
Tough competition in Brussels
Fewer than 1 in 100 businesses receive a Horizon 2020 grant, so we were delighted to hear our proposal had been selected, and we were invited to a second round of pitching. Three members of the Hokodo team jumped on the train to Brussels to defend our proposal and we were announced as one of the lucky winners a few weeks later.
Hokodo is now joining the EIC Accelerator pilot’s SME Instrument Phase 2, which will catalyse our product roadmap and mean that small businesses all over Europe will soon have access to our tools.
Our forecast shows that Invoice Protection will help protect over €200 million worth of B2B trade in Europe over the next two years.
Grant awards like Horizon 2020 can provide a massive boost to a startup’s early days. We’re over the moon to have been awarded and have wasted no time in kick-starting our mission.
