SWEDEN – Willa, a Venice, California, and Stockholm, Sweden-based fintech startup for freelancers to get paid on time, raised $3m in seed funding.
The round was led by EQT Ventures with participation from Nordic Makers (collective of U.S. unicorn founders), Mattias Ljungman (Atomico co-founder, now running Moonfire Ventures), Johan Lorenzen (angel investor and co-founder of freelancer bank Holvi) and Michael Hansen (angel investor and fintech entrepreneur). The company intends to use the funds to launch Willa Pay to provide its community of creative freelancers with an easy tool to get paid with no paperwork or risk. Founded in 2019 and led by Kristofer Sommestad, CEO, and Aron Levin, CMO, Willa is a distributed company which is advancing Willa Pay, a tool that makes collaboration between freelancers and corporations easy. As soon as a freelancer has completed a job, they use the Willa Pay app to quickly let Willa know the details of the job they have done, how much they are supposed to get paid, and who they did the job for. On the other side, Willa Pay takes care of the contact with the corporation and gets all the paperwork in order. Should the freelancer wish to get paid earlier than a corporation’s standard terms, which is often anything from 30-90 days, Willa Pay will pay the freelancer directly and take a small fee. Consequently, the freelancer can finally get a predictable income, pay their bills, and protect their credit score. Willa Pay is currently in beta and invitation only. The company will start to bring freelancers and creators on board in Q3 2020. 30/06/2020
