Interview with Nicola Weedall, Co-Founder at Digital Invoice Finance Platform: Hydr

Hydr is a digital invoice finance platform that helps small businesses optimise their cash flow.

Hydr removes the barrier of waiting for payment by paying 100% of your invoice, minus our fixed fee, within 24 hours. The fee we quote is always the fee you pay, we charge no subscription or listing fees and our price doesn’t change if your customer is a little behind in paying their invoice.

Onboarding is fully digital and our platform integrates seamlessly with Xero’s cloud accounting software to give funding decisions in real time.

We work with small businesses registered in England in Wales that sell B2B products or services. We build strong, professional relationships with their customers, freeing business owners to spend their valuable time on running their businesses.

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

Me and Hector (Macandrew, co-founder) have had first-hand experience of the transformative impact that managing cash flow can have. We knew that with the right technology and with transparency and simplicity at the heart of our service, Hydr could help many businesses.

My career has been in fintech across lending and invoice finance and building a digital invoice finance proposition that’s really easy to use and scalable has been in my mind for some time. We’re so happy with the product we’ve created and launched.

How has the company evolved during the pandemic?

We’re a new company having launched last month (May 2021) but we’ve been developing Hydr since before the pandemic.

We feel strongly that the success of a business shouldn’t be about its ability to wait for payment and with nearly two thirds of all SMEs experiencing either an increase in late payments or payments frozen completely as a result of the pandemic, we accelerated product development to launch Hydr in May this year.

During the pandemic we have set up our HQ at Enterprise City, the tech district of Manchester which is home to a number of brilliant technology companies. It’s the perfect place for us.

What can we hope to see from Hydr in the future?

You’ll see lots of customers whose business lives have been transformed because their cash flow is predictable and they have more time to spend on their business with Hydr as their trusted partner.

We will continue to scale our business and will integrate with more cloud accounting software providers so that customers who are not with Xero can take advantage of our service. We will also launch our mobile app and grow our team.