The best solutions emerge in the least expected places, or in the most cumbersome tasks, such as paying invoices to suppliers. It is one of the most arduous procedures of any business, a nightmare of lost emails, points out Barcelona telecommunications engineer Adam Barbera (36 years old, Santpedor): “If there is no clear communication, it becomes a bottleneck.” He endured it for years as an employee at a computer equipment distributor. Barbera and two other colleagues (industrial engineer Naqqash Abassi and management professional Fernando Martín) left the firm in 2021 and founded Dost, the Barcelona fintech that uses AI to automate payment to suppliers. Today, Dost invoices more than three million a year and has just begun its international expansion, heading to the United Kingdom, the largest financial market in Europe.More informationThe automatic payment system, which launched the fintech in 2022, takes charge of the entire invoice payment process: from the reception and capture of documents to the line-by-line reconciliation of them and the final integration with the client’s resource planning (ERP) software and cuts the time to process the invoices by 80%. payments, estimates Barbera in an interview with EL PAÍS as CEO of Dost. In addition to the accounts payable platform, the fintech offers another, separate platform, to automate invoice collection. The Barcelona fintech claims that its AI achieves an accuracy of 95% in payments, an unbeatable mark, according to the CEO: «There are particularities that do not come from technology, but from people. The AI is not going to generate an order number on the invoice if the supplier forgot to do so.» In just three years, Dost’s platform has already processed more than four million transactions from more than 100 companies, mostly in Spain, including the retailer PrimaPrix, the real estate company Housfy and the food manufacturer Chovy. Nine out of every ten euros of Dost’s income comes from Spain and Portugal, despite the fact that it has clients in more than 10 countries, including the US, Latin America and Europe. “Our biggest challenge now is internationalization,” declares Barbera from the fintech offices in London, where he has lived for four months. Of Dost’s 50 employees, seven are in the London offices to promote the brand: they work in the areas of sales, advertising and customer service. The CEO explains that they have chosen the United Kingdom as «the first step» in a process of international expansion whose ultimate goal is the United States: «The visit to the United Kingdom gives us international visibility and thus opens the door to the United States, where 80% of the global software market is located. If you want to build a large company, you have to be in the United States.»Half of the income. of fintech are allocated to sales and advertising expenses. “As we continue to invest in growth, the break-even point is far away,” estimates Barbera. However, Dost has the backing of his investors. It has raised just over 10 million euros in three rounds of financing, six million in the last one alone, held last November to finance its expansion to the United Kingdom. The main fintech investor is the British venture capital fund Octopus Venture, followed by the Spanish TQ Ventures.
