Thrive, which has over 7,000 businesses on its launch waitlist, has developed a unique product that automates banking, accounting, tax and lending for small-to-medium businesses. After recently emerging for stealth mode, the business was excited to see demand from its waitlist members who also wanted to invest.

Michael Nuciforo, Co-founder & CEO, explained that the decision to crowdfund was driven primarily from their member base. “We have been running a number of focus groups with small business owners as we put the finishing touches on our product. After we kept getting asked about investment, we decided that we couldn’t think of anything better than to allow our members to become investors in the business as well.”

Australia’s 2.3 million small-to-medium businesses which employ over half the country’s workforce and account for a third of the GDP, are burdened by the significant amount of time and cost involved in managing their finances. Recent research conducted by Thrive highlighted that financial admin was the most disliked activity in running a business and that business owners waste over 42 days a year in managing their financial affairs.

Thrive solves this problem by combining a smart business account with value-added services like receipt scanning, invoicing, tax forecasting, payroll and more. Using AI and ML, these tools are designed to run on autopilot, winning back time for busy business owners and making it easy for them to stay in control of their financial destiny.

Thrive co-founder Ben Winford said, “Thrive has an outstanding leadership team which is supported by an advisory committee made of some of Australia’s leading banking and payment experts. The product roadmap is super exciting, and it makes complete sense for us to take advantage of the ‘crowd’ to raise capital.”

Thrive is following in the footsteps of global fintech giants Revolt and Monzo who both had success with crowdfunding in the UK.