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Sabatec Limited is a UK-HQ fintech startup rebuilding the infrastructure connecting mid-market enterprises with global institutional capital. When the project started, the company had fewer than ten employees and was at an early stage of validating both its business model and its technology strategy. The relationship began through one of Sabatec’s co-founders, who had worked with us successfully on previous ventures.
The problem we solved
The request was to build a platform capable of making automated lending decisions based on invoice factoring, with a strong focus on AI-driven workflows and future risk modelling. The underlying problem was not the software, but building a lending platform that could scale on limited startup funding, which meant automating as much of the process as possible from the start. Handled manually, the same business would carry high operational costs, slow customer onboarding and risk assessment that varied from case to case. Sabatec also needed the foundations for its own proprietary risk decision engine, to be trained later on its own transaction history.
What we built
Work started in 2023 with an extended technology and business analysis phase, where the first decision was which capabilities to build internally and which to outsource to trusted third-party providers. The platform now includes a client-facing application for desktop and mobile browsers, seller registration and onboarding, KYB (Know Your Business) verification, invoice submission and financing requests, back-office tools for the operations team, risk assessment workflows, invoice lifecycle management, and AI-powered analysis of documents, email and metadata. The system can onboard a company, gather public data from external providers, analyse company and invoice risk through Python-based risk engines and support financing decision workflows on top of that. It runs on AWS infrastructure (S3, Bedrock, SageMaker, RDS, VPC and other services), built with .NET, React and Python, and delivered through Agile and Kanban. The vision evolved considerably over the course of the project, and team size varied from two senior developers to periods with a single senior developer supporting the whole platform, so priorities, architecture decisions and development approaches were adjusted continuously to match the resources available.
What was harder than expected
Delivering a fintech platform with a team this small, while holding quality, security and delivery speed. At times a single senior engineer covered development, technical leadership, DevOps, system administration and QA at once. The second challenge was movement: as a startup, Sabatec’s discussions with investors regularly introduced new assumptions and strategic directions that the roadmap had to absorb. What worked against that was showing things early – prototypes, wireframes and simple UI mockups put in front of the business team surfaced wrong assumptions before development effort went into them. Every technical decision came down to the same balance between speed, cost and quality; technical excellence was never the only criterion.
Outcome & what’s next
The platform does more than its budget suggests it should, and in investor demonstrations that gap is the thing people comment on. The AI-driven workflows draw the most attention and have become one of the product’s clearest differentiators. Delivered so far: end-to-end onboarding, automated data collection and enrichment, AI-assisted analysis flows, risk assessment, and a cloud architecture designed for future growth. The engagement has become an ongoing partnership rather than a one-off project. As the platform moves further into production and begins financing real transactions, successful business validation is expected to attract additional investment. The next stage is expected to include expanding the development team, deepening automation and AI-driven decision-making, and eventually training and deploying Sabatec’s own production risk models on real transaction data.