Tuesday 23rd April, 2013

The thing about start-ups is that it's impossible to stop the onward march of those coming up behind you. In a move which is likely to make Tradeshift look over their shoulders, the latest "new kid" is Dublin based Senddr - an e-invoicing provider helping businesses with end-to-end connectivity between supplier and customer. OK, so perhaps that bit's not so new and exciting. There are plenty of providers who can claim to offer that. The main difference with Senddr is that it's free to small businesses and supports multiple accounting software - which of course then has the capacity to dramatically reduce the chances of error and fraud, while boosting profits at the same time.

Arguably though, it's the (potential) size of network and the opportunities that presents to wider business which addresses the "new and exciting" tag, and connecting with Xero, Freshbooks, Sage 50, SageOne, Quickbooks, Yendo, Zoho, FreeAgent and Kashflow as well as Microsoft Dynamics and Oracle Financials offers Senddr a very wide ranging exposure indeed. In fact as Steve O'Hear reports in Techcrunch, 10,000 businesses have already signed up during the 4 month beta period.

The company, which has just moved to bigger offices in the heart of Dublin's Digital Hub (home to EMEA headquarters of Google, Facebook and LinkedIn) received an undisclosed amount of funding from Enterprise Ireland and angel investors.

Pete Loughlin, writing in Purchasing Insight feels that Senddr are likely to be in for a long slog before they can catch up with some of the business benefits currently being bandied around by companies like Tradeshift - not least their challenge to traditional banking among them. But is a this space which is up for grabs - and it's likely that there'll be some interesting shifts in the landscape over the next few years.