Why Iridium
Iridium is building the infrastructure that scales invoice finance. So that every business can access the money they're already owed.
Backed by strategic institutional investors.
Context
Every business that sells to another business has invoices. Every time goods are delivered or a service is rendered, an invoice exists. In aggregate, US businesses are sitting on $7 trillion of this.
It is, in theory, the most abundant form of collateral in existence. And yet less than 1% of it is ever used to secure financing.
Underwrite. Verify. Collect.
Lending against invoices isn’t new. Lenders have known for decades that a confirmed invoice from a creditworthy buyer is about as safe a bet as commercial lending gets - you’re underwriting a transaction that already happened. But doing it safely is brutally, structurally manual, and that burden doesn’t stay flat as you scale. It compounds. To lend against an invoice, a lender has to do three things every single time:
Underwrite
Is this borrower legitimate, is the debtor actually going to pay, and what does the risk look like across the whole lending book when you add this invoice in?
Verify
Is this invoice real, was the work actually done, and does the backup documentation across email threads, supplier portals, and accounting systems hold up?
Collect
When does the money actually arrive, and who is chasing the invoices that aren't paying on time?
Lenders process thousands of invoices every week. Each one needs all three and there is no shortcut that doesn’t introduce risk. The temptation to sample, verify 20% and fund everything, is how the industry has lost billions.
lost to fabricated invoices that cleared multiple audit checkpoints.
lost to invoices that turned out to be misrepresented.
Fraudulent invoices look exactly like real ones, until they don't.
Why nothing has fixed it
You’d think LLMs would have solved this by now. They haven't.
Off-the-shelf models aren’t enough.
Verifying a single invoice requires synthesising signals that are fundamentally different in nature: some invoices arrive as blurry receipts in foreign languages, others are buried in millions of rows in an Excel sheet, backup documentation lives in portals that require browser agents just to access, and payment histories, debtor behaviour, and fraud signals ranging from IP analysis to document forensics all have to be read simultaneously and reconciled into a single judgment. No general purpose model was built to hold all of that together, and you can’t solve it by stitching subsystems together either. Our goal is to enable lending against every invoice in the US, and that demands something architecturally different: a system general enough to reason across any invoice, in any format, from any industry, and robust enough to do it at the scale of millions of invoices a year.
Even if the models were good enough, the harness doesn’t exist.
No system that maintains a living view of a lending book and updates it as every new invoice changes the risk profile. No engine that gets smarter with every invoice funded and every payment collected. No voice layer that can collect on invoices the way a human would, with the right context, the right tone, and the right moment. Automated reminders recover a fraction of what a well-timed, informed conversation does.
A note to you
The average person spends 40 years in their career. That’s a long time to spend on something you don’t truly love. The people that care deeply about their work are exactly who we’re building this with.
We’re not looking for someone who has done this before. We’re looking for someone who thinks higher up the stack than their experience would suggest. Someone who understands that the tools available today mean the only real limit is how boldly you’re willing to think. The builders who will win in this era aren’t the deepest specialists. They’re the ones with the range to reason across systems and the courage to build things that haven’t been built before.
We believe greatness builds with time, not by chasing easy wins. The people we want dive head first into the deep end, with an almost delusional belief that they’ll figure it out, even when nothing yet suggests they will.
This journey is hard. It is also one of the most rewarding things you will ever do. The people who join us early are the DNA of what Iridium becomes. We will give you every resource, every bit of support, and hold you to the highest bar we know how to set. We expect you to hold us to the same.
Also we’re pretty good company. It’s a long road and we intend to enjoy every bit of it.
- Anthony & Preesha