Hokodo After the EIC Accelerator: Trade Credit Startup Wound Up

Late payment is one of the oldest problems in business, and credit insurance, the standard protection against a customer who never pays, has mostly been sold to large companies through brokers. Hokodo, founded in 2018 by three people from the credit insurance industry, set out to sell that protection one invoice at a time, inside the accounting software and online marketplaces that small firms already use. Its Paris company, Hokodo SAS, was selected at the 9 January 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of the EIC Accelerator, for a project called APIIP, according to the European Commission's list of selected companies. The list names Hokodo SAS as the project's only company, and CORDIS records an EU contribution of €1,988,236.25 towards a total cost of €2,840,337.50, from 1 June 2019 to 31 May 2021.

Seven years later the company no longer exists as a business. "In late 2025, we wound up Hokodo," its three founders wrote in an account published on the company's website in April 2026. The French register shows that Hokodo SAS has been dissolved and placed under a liquidator, and the British operating company is in a solvent liquidation.

Where Hokodo Stands Now

The founders say they wound the company up in late 2025 because "our financing cost was too high to bring us to profitability before 2027" and because "the company needed revenue and runway simultaneously, and we couldn't keep both", according to their April 2026 account. They have started a consulting firm, Liquidity Lab, that helps companies automate credit decisions and collections themselves. The insurance trade site Coverager reported the shutdown on 10 April 2026, and FinTech Futures also reported that Hokodo had closed. The founders did not say in which month of 2025 the decision was taken.

The registers show the legal end. On 17 July 2026 the official French gazette BODACC published the dissolution of Hokodo SAS, with president Louis Carbonnier and managing director Sami Ben Hatit leaving office and the firm Mandataires Judiciaires Associés (MJA) named as liquidator. North Data records the termination on 13 May 2026. BODACC lists no insolvency judgment for the company. In London, Companies House shows that Hokodo Services Ltd entered a members' voluntary liquidation, a winding-up of a company whose directors declare it able to pay its debts, on 14 May 2026, with liquidators from Interpath. The holding company, Hokodo Ltd, is still listed as active, with its last accounts made up to 31 May 2024.

The Technology: Credit Insurance by API

Trade credit insurance pays a seller when a business customer fails to pay an invoice. Insurers usually cover a company's whole turnover under an annual policy, sold through brokers. Hokodo's pitch to the EU was that brokers cannot earn enough from small firms to serve them, so it would put insurance on single invoices at the point of sale, "as orders are accepted or invoices raised on the cloud accounting platforms or B2B marketplaces that SMEs use daily", through an application programming interface (API) that partner platforms plug into, according to the project summary on CORDIS. The company claimed that only 0.25% of SMEs had such cover. Underneath sat automated pricing and underwriting engines and its own credit score, HokoScore, according to Insurance Edge.

The founders had worked on the inside of the industry. Insurance Edge described Richard Thornton as a former chief risk officer and chief operating officer of Aspen Insurance and Sami Ben Hatit as a former head of the digital practice at Euler Hermes, now Allianz Trade; the founders' own account says the three spent years at firms "including at Allianz Trade". Before the grant, Hokodo had a risk capacity deal with the reinsurer SCOR and had sold its first policy through the trade finance platform Centrifuge in the UK, according to CORDIS.

By 2021 the product had changed shape. When Hokodo raised its Series A in June 2021, it presented itself as a B2B buy now, pay later provider that gives business buyers real-time trade credit, with non-payment insurance backed by Lloyd's of London, according to Tech.eu. The founders later described the thesis as bundling "real-time credit decisioning, fraud detection, financing, collections, and insurance into a single API". The insurance engine became one component of a financing product, and the company later took a full EU payments licence, according to its news page.

What APIIP Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The proposal promised to protect German and French SMEs in domestic trade and in exports to the UK, Spain, Italy and the United States, and said the grant "will enable us to realise €55M revenue within five years", according to CORDIS. When the award was announced in July 2019, Hokodo said the grant would let it launch invoice protection and HokoScore in France and Germany within 12 months, according to Insurance Edge and EU-Startups, which both put the grant at €2 million.

The final periodic report, covering June 2020 to May 2021, says Hokodo launched in France and Germany and built pricing and underwriting engines that "price trade credit insurance risks in less than 1 second". It lists deals with "the largest domestic accounting platform in France", a digitally native bank and two French B2B marketplaces, without naming them. The export markets in the report had shifted to the UK, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands. The project ran its planned 24 months. No CORDIS results, deliverables or publications are listed beyond the report.

1. Launch in FranceDeliveredCORDIS report; French clients including Ankorstore named by Frenchweb in 2022.
2. Launch in GermanyUnverifiedStated only in the company's CORDIS report; Frenchweb listed the UK, France and Spain as markets in 2022.
3. Real-time pricing and underwritingDeliveredEngines reported on CORDIS; real-time credit decisions described by Tech.eu in 2021.
4. Distribution through platformsPartlyMarketplace deals made; the accounting platform and bank partners were never named publicly.
5. €55M revenue within five yearsNot achievedHokodo SAS reported €2.51M revenue for 2024/25; no group revenue was published.

What It Achieved After the Grant

The venture money came after the grant. Hokodo raised $12.5 million in a Series A in June 2021, led by Mosaic Ventures with Notion Capital and Anthemis, according to Tech.eu and Coverager. A $40 million Series B followed in June 2022, led by Notion Capital with Korelya Capital, Mundi Ventures and Opera Tech Ventures, according to Frenchweb, which put it at €37 million, and Fintech Nexus. At that point Hokodo had 85 staff, a third of them in Paris, and more than 30,000 business customers, and planned to hire 50 more people within a year, Frenchweb reported.

Citi added to the Series B in April 2023, according to the company's news page. In April 2024 Viola Credit provided a €100 million debt facility, meant to fund about €1.5 billion of B2B transactions over 24 months, according to the law firm Sorainen, which advised on the deal, and the company. In November 2024 Hokodo said it would use Munich Re's Talaria underwriting platform to cover almost every European country, according to Reinsurance News. The last round was €10 million in April 2025, led by Korelya Capital and Opera Tech Ventures, BNP Paribas's venture fund, with Mundi Ventures and Notion Capital, to prepare a Series C, according to a company release.

The Accounts of the Grant Holder

Hokodo SAS, the Paris company that held the grant, filed its accounts for the years to May 2023 and May 2024 with a confidentiality declaration, so revenue was not published, according to BODACC. Its net result can still be read from the financial ratios the French state publishes from those filings: a loss of €3,136,647 in 2022/23, €4,694,778 in 2023/24 and €8,497,258 in 2024/25, according to the INPI ratios dataset. The 2024/25 accounts were filed publicly and show revenue of €2,507,094, figures repeated in the state's company directory. The same dataset gives the company a negative financial autonomy ratio in all three years, which indicates negative equity, so the French unit depended on its group for funding. The accounts of the British companies for the final year had not been filed by October 2026.

The founders' own diagnosis is blunt. "We made expensive hiring decisions before they were justified, and we paid a heavy cost for those mistakes," they wrote, adding that they raised the Series B "just as the rate cycle turned" and should have "cut costs dramatically and hoarded our Series B raise". They also concluded that large merchants, the customers they most wanted, will not hand their receivables to a fintech whose cost of capital is higher than their own.

Why It Matters for Europe

Late payment is an EU policy problem. The Late Payment Directive, Directive 2011/7/EU, limits payment terms between companies to 60 days unless agreed otherwise, and the Commission says that "each year across Europe thousands of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) go bankrupt waiting for their invoices to be paid", on its late payment page. Hokodo's project fitted that agenda: it tried to give small firms the cover large firms buy, and it was one of the first B2B pay later providers in Europe. The founders write that by the time they closed "there were credible competitors across the continent". The grant helped build working technology; it did not create a lasting European company.

The Verdict

This article is based on public records and published statements, linked throughout. The founders and the EIC were not asked for comment.