Cheque raises $670K to help small businesses get paid faster

For millions of small businesses in the U.S., cash flow is a persistent pain point. Vendors often wait weeks – or even months – to get paid, especially if they lack access to traditional credit.

Swedish-American startup Cheque addresses this head-on by allowing businesses to offer flexible payment terms with built-in early payment incentives. Vendors are matched with clients willing to pay early in return for a discount. The result is faster payments, without relying on loans or factoring.

“We’re building an invoicing platform that works like a credit exchange,” says co-founder and CEO Julia Delin. “It lets vendors put a price on getting paid early – and matches them with clients willing to pay early for a discount. It creates a real-time market price for short-term credit.”

From the team behind Sweden’s top startup lab

Delin and Johansson met at SSE Business Lab, the Stockholm School of Economics’ incubator that once helped launch Swedish fintech giant Klarna. Under their leadership, it became one of Europe’s top-ranked university incubators (Financial Times) and together, they launched the university’s first $10 million venture fund.

While mentoring over 150 startups and investing in 20, Delin and Johansson kept encountering the same issue: founders grappling with slow cash cycles and limited access to financing – especially those running bootstrapped or service-based businesses.

“The business owners we spoke to were tired of acting as a bank for their customers,” says Delin. “We wanted to fix cash flow for businesses that don’t have access to credit lines, or don’t want to jeopardize client relationships through invoice factoring.”

“Some people were definitely surprised when we left our cushy investor jobs,” adds Johansson. “But we’re builders at heart, and once we started obsessing over this problem, there was no turning back.”

Together with technical co-founder Sebastian Bas, they built Cheque to help unlock the $15 trillion currently tied up in accounts payable and receivable across the U.S.

Cash flow through an invoicing product

While platforms like Ramp, Square and Mercury are expanding into invoicing, Cheque is betting there’s still whitespace. Rather than compete directly, Cheque sees itself offering a different value proposition.

Unlike traditional invoicing tools, Cheque only charges when a vendor actually gets paid early. That makes it free to use unless it improves the user’s cash flow.

The founders say that that aligns their incentives with their customers’. This is similar to how Agree.com offers their signing tool for free, while making its money on transaction fees from payments on the platform.

“Our customers aren’t shopping around for marginally better invoicing software. It’s the promise of improving cash flow that draws customers to us”, says Delin.

Raising money to take on the U.S.

The oversubscribed $670,000 funding round will support Cheque’s expansion in the U.S. market. The round was led by Friends Capital, the investment firm founded by the team behind Benify (acquired by Zellis in 2024), and included angel checks from Tom Höglund (CBDO at Epidemic Sound), Samir El-Sabini (founder of Juni), and several prominent angel investors.

As for why Sweden continues to produce successful fintech startups, Delin points to a national obsession with usability.

“Whether it’s IKEA, Spotify, or Klarna, we’re obsessed with making things simple, especially when they’re complex under the hood”, she says. “That mindset has shaped how we built Cheque. We believe finance tools should feel as intuitive as any consumer app, even when they’re solving deep financial problems.”

About Cheque

Cheque is a fintech platform that helps small businesses get paid faster by offering early payment incentives on their invoices and matching them with clients on the platform with excess liquidity. Founded in Sweden and now based in New York, Cheque enables vendors to improve cash flow without loans, factoring, or credit. The company was founded by Julia Delin, Andreas Johansson, and Sebastian Bas in 2024.