Engage:BDR Raises $26M To Accelerate Publishers’ AR

With a solution designed to accelerate B2B payments to publishers, Engage:BDR has announced a $26.25 million fundraise, reports in L.A. Biz said Wednesday (Sept. 25).

Reports did not reveal who provided the funding, which comes in the form of debt and equity, but Engage:BDR said it plans to deploy the investment to strengthen its NetZero payment solution. According to the company, publishers struggle with 60- and 90-day payment terms after invoicing their advertising clients, and face high-interest rates from third party financing and factoring firms.

To fill this need without charging high interest rates, Engage:BDR operates its own advertising platform and on-boarding “significant supply and demand partnerships from providing publishers improved cash flow,” according to the company’s CEO Ted Dhanik, who added that NetZero is able to provide cash to publishers the same day they send out an invoice.

Engage:BDR trades on the Australian Securities Exchange, and its solutions are available in Australia, Europe and North America, it said.

Engage:BDR isn’t the only FinTech targeting cash flow management in the advertising and publishing sector.

Another company, Good Life Networks, spoke with PYMNTS in May about its own solution addressing the challenge of long payment terms to publishers, as well as the continued practice of using checks and wires to pay those firms.

“We’ve seen all these big changes in the industry, but people who are paying late still pay late,” said the company’s CEO Jesse Dylan. “We’re not really seeing anything change on the AR [accounts receivable] side.”

Dylan pointed to the industry’s reliance on major global corporations that are the clients of these publishing firms. Having such large, high-profile clients limits a publisher’s ability to leverage their position in the market and request or demand faster payments.

Good Life Networks also acknowledged the high-interest rates of factoring companies and is developing a blockchain solution to sit in between publishers and advertiser clients to source investors to finance unpaid invoices at more affordable rates.