Announcing our £500,000 fundraise to help SMBs save thousands on their subscription expenses

Matt Bird

Matt Bird

April 18, 2024

3 min read

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Matt and James - Lemon Co-Founders
Matt and James - Lemon Co-Founders

Today, we are thrilled to be sharing the news that we have raised £500,000 in funding from SFC Capital, Pitchdrive and angel investors.

This is a big moment for us.

We started building Lemon last year with the simple mission to help SMBs and SaaS vendors alike spend less monthly and make more monthly.

In October last year, we doubled down on what the product for the SMB looked like. There are still so many challenges in managing cash-flow, streamlining operations and building efficiencies without burdening the businesses with ‘another tool’.

We are also startup and SMB operators so we looked internally at our experiences from past ventures and the main contributors to the organisational headache. We quickly identified that software subscriptions took up the bulk of our spending and had done for years and years, yet we weren’t taking care of how we paid for them, how we controlled them or how we found them.

The result = thousands of pounds per year wasted on licences we didn’t need, premium prices we were forced to pay due to cash availability and onboarding to products that just didn’t work for our business.

And we weren’t alone. Software spending is a businesses third largest expense after people and rent. Today, I would argue that for a lot of businesses, software is THE largest spend line.

Lemon is doing something about that.

We’ve been working behind the scenes with around 40 SMBs covering a variety of different sectors to understand the pain points, the challenges and importantly, if our solutions meet’s those requirements.

Using Lemon, SMBs across any industry (although we have a focus on agencies / service businesses right now) can centralise their subscription management, building a single source of truth for all subscriptions across multiple products, teams and employees. This clarity alone will help highlight areas of inefficiency, where businesses can see overspend on unused licences, products and seats. Even by doing this, we know that there is potentially thousands of pounds of cost saving to be had.

Our research suggests that the typical SMB spends £30,000 on software — that’s a significant amount, so any money that can go back into the pocket of the business makes this worthwhile.

But we’re not stopping there. Subscription tracking is just the first of many tools we’re launching to support our mission. We’re working on embedded, instant credit propositions that will allow an SMB to save upto 40% on the software they use day in, day out. Credit that actually saves people money is pretty novel isn’t it!

There are also more discoverability tools, usage reports, detailed analytics and strategic partnerships that are being worked on that will help make Lemon a go-to place for everything business subscriptions.

With this new injection of capital and the expertise our VCs and angels bring to the table, we’re super excited to be building the leading product within our space. The global vision for Lemon is to produce a best in class ‘Klarna for B2B subscriptions’ product, spanning payments, credit, centralisation, discovery, checkout & more.

If you’d like to start building some clarity in your subscriptions, it’s free to do so over at https://app.spendlemon.com — we’re also available for demo’s intro calls and feedback, so do reach out if you’d like to.

Thanks to our early customers, our investors and our networks for the help we’ve received in building Lemon so far — we’re looking forward to the next phase of our journey.

Matt, James & Matt.

Founding team at Lemon.

Matt Bird, Matt Parke and James Lewis - the Lemon team
Matt Bird, Matt Parke and James Lewis - the Lemon team
  • Fintech
  • Fundraising
  • Startup
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