Iridium Credit, a provider of verification infrastructure for the invoice finance market, has secured $3m in a funding round jointly led by Field Ventures and MGV.

The company uses agentic technology to check each invoice a lender finances against its supporting documentation, confirm it with the debtor, and track it all the way through collections and cash posting. Iridium says this approach makes reviewing a lender’s entire book less expensive than manually reviewing only a portion of it.

According to Iridium, gaps in manual verification have held back invoice finance in the US. The practice, in which a business sells an unpaid invoice to a lender at a discount in exchange for immediate cash, accounts for just 2% of US GDP. By comparison, it reaches 14% in Chile, which benefits from a government e-invoicing registry.

The firm attributes this gap to the difficulty of confirming that invoices are genuine. Manual checks cost a factor roughly $22 in staff time per invoice, meaning only around 20% of invoices are verified, and smaller invoices are frequently left unfunded. A common workaround, confirming that an invoice appears on the debtor’s ledger, can take between two and three weeks and does not involve reviewing the underlying paperwork.

Unchecked invoices have created exposure running into billions of dollars. 3bn in factoring liabilities. Point Bonita Capital, part of Jefferies’ Leucadia Asset Management, had been factoring First Brands invoices owed by retailers such as Walmart, AutoZone and O’Reilly, and reported exposure of around $715m. A court-appointed examiner concluded that lenders purchasing these receivables generally did not view the original invoices or cross-check the data against those in First Brands’ own database.

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