At the end of what has undeniably been another tumultuous year for individuals and organisations across the world, we wanted to take a look back at some of the highlights we have experienced as a business in the past 365 days. Here’s Hokodo’s 2021, all wrapped up.
Series A fundraising
Back in June we announced the result of our Series A fundraise. Led by Mosaic Ventures, with participation from Notion Capital, prominent Angels and our seed investors Anthemis, we managed to raise a total of $12.5 million – an accomplishment that sits firmly towards the top of our list of achievements in 2021.
“The B2B purchasing experience has long lagged behind its B2C counterpart, and trade customers are calling for more,” said Toby Coppel, co-founder and partner at Mosaic Ventures in June. “Hokodo is building a next generation platform for digital commerce, offering real-time credit to make it easier for businesses to purchase goods and easier for merchants to convert sales and grow. We have seen the enormous impact of ‘buy now, pay later’ technology in the consumer market and, by solving the complexity of real-time trade finance, Hokodo is now bringing it to B2B.”
In a press release at the time, we revealed that our Series A funding would enable us to scale the Hokodo team, extend our platform to support more merchants in more countries and provide easy access to online credit terms to millions of cash-flow-constrained businesses. We’re delighted to say that we are well on our way to achieving those goals.
Strengthening the team
Speaking of such goals, another Hokodo highlight from this year has been growing the team from a headcount of fewer than 25 back in January to 60+ at the time of writing – that’s an increase of 140%!
We’ve been hiring across all departments and disciplines from sales and marketing through to tech and data science, and we don’t have plans to slow down any time soon: we already have 10 new starters lined up for 2022 and a number of vacancies in both London and Paris still left to fill. If you would like to work alongside passionate and ambitious colleagues in one of Europe’s most exciting B2B fintech companies, we would love to hear from you.
An amazing offsite
In October, we took our (then) 50 Hokodians to Malta for a 5-day offsite. After a tough couple of years marked by Covid – much of which we spent working from home – the offsite gave us a chance to:
- Align on our strategic goals for 2022 🚀
- Develop cross-functional ways of working ✅
- Hone our value proposition 🎯
- Build trust and relationships 🤝
Most importantly, we were able to spend time together and have fun as a team in the sunshine!
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Our new values
Another key highlight from 2021 was the conception of Hokodo’s new values. We asked the team what matters most to them in their professional lives and, using their responses, designed five new values that epitomise what it means to be a Hokodian:
- Own the outcome 🏅
- Trust and build trust 🤝
- Never be satisfied 💡
- No passion, no point 💝
- Be genuine (no BS) 💎
Key integrations
This year the Hokodo team has been hard at work creating integrations that make it easier than ever for merchants to implement our Buy Now, Pay Later solution within their existing checkouts.
Earlier in the year we partnered with SparkLayer in order to bring Buy Now, Pay Later to Shopify merchants, allowing them to turn their online stores into powerful B2B ordering platforms.
“Our collaboration with Hokodo really is a perfect match. Our solution helps B2B merchants solve the problem of making their ordering experience more connected and easier for the end customer; and Hokodo solves the problem of previously out-dated and time-consuming ways for B2B customers to pay online,” said SparkLayer Co-founder Chris Mattingly. “We're excited to see where our partnership takes us!”
We were also thrilled in November to announce a new Magento extension, allowing merchants on the platform to supercharge their stores and boost sales with fully integrated flexible payment options from Hokodo.
“We are all delighted about our new Magento extension and genuinely excited to help B2B merchants boost sales and increase conversion rates by providing their customers with flexible payment terms,” said Richard Thornton, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Hokodo. “We are looking forward to seeing how our integration with Magento benefits B2B merchants on the platform.”
Here at Hokodo we are only just getting started, and we can’t wait to see what 2022 brings for our business as we continue to help B2B merchants sell more online with our BNPL solution. Until then, we wish you a safe and happy end to the year.
