Young entrepreneurs: Aamar Aslam, Funding Invoice

Name: Aamar Aslam
Company: Funding Invoice
Age: 23
Website: fundinginvoice.com

If running a profitable business at the age of 23 doesn’t impress you, the fact that Aamar Aslam is currently running his third successful company – and has fitted in time to earn an economics degree – should.

In fact, it was Aslam’s second venture, a chauffeur company which he headed up during his first two years at the University of Warwick, which inspired his latest venture Funding Invoice.

When chauffeuring corporate clients, Aslam would often have to wait as long as 90 days for invoices to be paid, leaving him short of working capital for long periods of time.

With employees to pay and banks refusing to give him a loan, Aslam raised finance from a private investor and repaid this finance as his invoices came through. Suspecting that plenty of other businesses would also benefit from doing this, Aslam saw potential for a platform that would work with investors to allow businesses to borrow against invoices on flexible terms.

With the help of two angel investors, university funding and support from co-founder Kautham Haran, Aslam launched Funding Invoice in October 2015 immediately after graduating.

18 months on and Funding Invoice’s flexible approach and comparatively low, one-time transaction fees have proved popular with repeat custom from start-ups and small businesses across the UK.

Spectacularly, the business has been profitable from the get-go and Aslam says that the company’s first major milestone in facilitating £1m worth of finance “came much sooner than expected”.

To date, Funding Invoice has lent over £6m to small businesses and Aslam is confident the company will increase this number to £20m in 2017.

Now planning to grow his team of six and move the company HQ from Surrey to London, Aslam’s ultimate goal is for Funding Invoice to become a “one-stop-shop for finance for small and medium enterprises around the world”.

With an ambitious and hard-working young entrepreneur like Aslam at the helm, we can see this goal coming to fruition.