Duqu raises €1.5M to give businesses faster access to working capital

Amsterdam fintech Duqu has closed a €1.5 million pre-seed round from Curiosity VC and No Such Ventures, and it wants to make slow-paying invoices a little less brutal for businesses.

The company offers short-term advances against outstanding B2B invoices. In practice, that means a business can unlock cash it has already earned but hasn’t received yet, instead of waiting on a customer’s payment schedule. Duqu says Dutch businesses pay 46 per cent of their B2B invoices after the due date, which leaves companies scrambling to cover the usual bills: salaries, inventory, marketing and hiring.

There’s a catch in the usual sense, and Duqu is trying to avoid it. Unlike factoring, businesses keep ownership of their invoices and stay in control of customer relationships. There’s no minimum or maximum amount, and fees are only charged when an advance is used. Once approved, the money can arrive within 24 hours, and often within an hour.

The financing product is only half the story. Over the past year and a half, Duqu has also been building its own AI underwriting engine, which it says automates around 95 per cent of the credit assessment process. That system is modular, so banks, lenders and leasing companies can use it as a white-label tool to assess applications against their own credit policies.

The new money will go into both lines of business: the working capital platform and the underwriting technology. Co-founder Maas de Goede puts the pitch plainly enough: businesses can do almost everything instantly now, but getting paid can still take weeks. Duqu is trying to make that delay feel old-fashioned.