Duqu raises €1.5M Pre-Seed to make AI-driven invoice financing viable for European SMBs

Duqu (Amsterdam) has raised €1.5 million in a Pre-Seed round co-led by Curiosity VC and No Such Ventures. Founded in October 2025 by Maas de Goede (CEO), Victor Brouwer, and Diederik Nassenstein, the company runs an AI-driven invoice financing platform that advances cash against outstanding invoices for SMBs. The company is less than a year old.

Early metrics: approximately 1,500 users, €4.6 million in financing applications processed, and €1.2 million actually advanced since launch.

The structural gap

Invoice financing has existed for decades, but small businesses have been largely excluded from it — not because demand is absent but because unit economics have not worked. Manual credit assessment takes time and expertise that lenders cannot recover on small applications. A €5,000 invoice request requires nearly the same evaluation effort as a €500,000 one, so providers concentrate on larger clients and underserve SMBs.

Maas de Goede frames the user problem plainly: "Businesses can arrange almost everything instantly today, yet after completing the work they can still wait weeks to get paid. That no longer matches the pace at which businesses operate."

Herman Kienhuis of Curiosity VC articulates the supply-side thesis: "Small applications are relatively expensive for traditional lenders to assess and process. Duqu has built a fully AI-driven credit assessment and processing stack."

The AI credit stack

Duqu's core claim is that AI-driven credit assessment makes the unit economics of small-ticket invoice financing viable. If accurate and scalable, the addressable market is large: SMBs across Europe collectively carry substantial outstanding receivables, most of which have no practical access to financing. The 1,500 users and €1.2M advanced is a very early data point, not a proof of the credit model at scale — that validation comes from default rates and conversion economics across a much larger sample.

Thijn van Helvoirt of No Such Ventures notes the technology is applicable to leasing, mortgages, and buy-now-pay-later — framing Duqu as an AI credit infrastructure company rather than an invoice financing specialist. A narrow product that works is worth funding; a generalised credit stack that does not yet exist is not. The €1.5M buys the team time to prove the invoice financing product first, and only then does the broader vision become buildable.