Anthony Venus and the business of paying attention

An invoice is a peculiarly optimistic document. It records work already done and money expected to arrive. Between those two events sits a department, a spreadsheet and, quite often, an increasingly diplomatic email. Anthony Venus saw enough of that interval to build a company around it. YayPay gave accounts receivable teams software for the unglamorous business of turning a sale into cash.

There is a temptation to begin his story with the acquisition. Quadient bought a majority stake in YayPay in July 2020, five years after its founding. But Venus had been working on the relationship between information and decisions long before anyone asked him about overdue invoices. And after the sale, his attention moved again, toward the people making those decisions. The interesting route runs through Singapore, London, New York and a partnership that survived the company’s change of ownership.

A small office on Amoy Street

In March 1998, Venus opened Strategic Intelligence in Singapore. Asia’s financial crisis was still unfolding. He had worked in business development for the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Asian infrastructure group until late 1997. An economics graduate from the University of Queensland, he was starting a research business at a moment when other organisations were cutting back.

His reasoning was plain: “The worse things got, the more need there was for good intelligence.” Six entrepreneurs contributed roughly $10,000 each. One early office occupied a small building on Amoy Street in Chinatown. In August, the company staged a conference featuring economist Paul Krugman; 450 corporate executives paid to attend. By May 2000, Strategic Intelligence had 50 full-time employees and 70 part-time researchers.

Those details give an early venture an actual address and a recognisable commercial proposition. Confusion had customers. Executives wanted help understanding the region they were doing business in. Venus’s response was to assemble people who could explain it. The modest office and the ticketed conference are useful reminders that an information business also needs someone to organise the room and sell the seats.

The sale after the sale

Venus went on to build businesses in market research and financial services, including Marketshare and Meridian. Repeated exposure to running companies brought a less abstract difficulty into view: knowing when customers would pay. A business can show revenue and still struggle to organise its working capital. Forecasting receipts becomes harder when the relevant history is scattered across accounting records and conversations.

YayPay began in London in July 2015, with incorporation in the United States. Venus’s fifth-anniversary account credits an early sequence of collaborators: Saul Frank, Brian Denenberg and then Eugene Vyborov. It also credits friends with providing the first outside capital. The opening cheque came from entrepreneurship professor Virginia Cha. Before institutional fundraising, there were people willing to back the attempt.

The product took on a specific administrative burden. Finance teams needed to know who owed money, what had already been said and which account required attention next. Automated reminders could handle routine follow-up. A shared record of communications could spare colleagues from reconstructing a conversation. Payment history could help a company anticipate receipts. The attraction was practical: fewer occasions for an invoice to disappear into somebody’s inbox.

A partner before a title

At Techstars Boston, Vyborov was helping the accelerator as a lead technology associate. Venus was participating with an early version of YayPay and asked for help. Vyborov ended up spending much of the three-month programme working alongside him. At its conclusion, Venus asked him to stay as co-founder and chief technology officer.

That sequence matters. They had a period of doing the work together before agreeing on the titles. In Vyborov’s later account, the encounter became an opening for discussing trust, disagreement and the ability to understand a partner’s perspective. Partnership was something to practise under pressure. The accelerator provided a short, demanding opportunity to discover how they worked.

Venus’s anniversary message to him was less procedural: “I would walk through walls for you.” He thanked the teams in Ukraine, the United States and the United Kingdom as well. The acknowledgement has a pleasingly crowded cast. A founder’s photograph fits neatly in a box; the people required to build the company tend to spill over the edges.

“I would walk through walls for you.”

Anthony Venus, to co-founder Eugene Vyborov, July 2020

The price of getting organised

YayPay joined 500 Startups’ twentieth batch in San Francisco in January 2017, after participating in Techstars. Its ambition extended beyond sending reminders. Venus wanted accounts receivable staff to have workflow tools comparable to those available to sales and marketing departments. The company was applying automation and machine learning to work that had remained heavily manual.

He also wanted a wider product. After a $5.3 million funding announcement in 2017, he described plans to expand from collections and cash prediction into a fuller order-to-cash suite. That required product development and more selling. Accounts receivable offered a clear problem, but serving it meant fitting into the financial systems businesses already used.

The early sales effort was suitably terrestrial. In a 2019 interview, Venus described using LinkedIn to identify adtech companies, then contacting controllers and finance chiefs through calls and emails. He estimated that they approached around twenty companies before winning the first deal. The software promised automation; persuading somebody to try it involved picking up the phone.

By December 2018, YayPay had raised an $8.4 million Series A led by Information Venture Partners. Venus traced the relationship with investor Rob Antoniades back roughly twelve to eighteen months before the formal fundraising process. He was also selling while raising money, relying on colleagues to keep the business moving. A funding round could occupy the announcement; the work behind it occupied much more of the calendar.

The commercial design followed invoice volume, with annual software fees and payment transaction revenue. The organisation crossed borders too. Venus moved to the UK in October 2019 and split management between Britain and the US East Coast. Building internationally was part of the operating arrangement, reflected in where people actually worked.

An exit with the lights left on

On July 29, 2020, Quadient announced the purchase of approximately 87% of YayPay’s parent company. The announced purchase price exceeded €17 million, excluding transaction costs. The founders retained minority stakes, and Quadient had a mechanism to increase its ownership later. These were the terms of the business transaction, rather than a measure of either founder’s personal proceeds.

The strategic connection was unusually literal. Quadient already served businesses sending invoices and related documents. Roughly a third of YayPay’s customers also used Quadient mailing equipment. The buyer could connect software for collecting payment with an existing customer base familiar with the documents that begin the process. For Venus, the acquisition offered access to a wider international footprint.

The product kept going. In November 2022, Venus signed the rebranding announcement as YayPay co-founder and CEO and Quadient’s Chief Solution & Product Officer for AR Automation. Customers were told their support contacts would remain the same. A new logo was the immediate visible change. The work of collecting outstanding money, indifferent to branding exercises, continued.

The founder becomes the question

By October 2024, Venus was speaking as a coach at CEO Coaching International. He described a point when YayPay’s growth had stalled and the team returned to its customer base: examining segments, buying reasons and patterns. The corrective started with closer attention to what the company already knew. His advice was to look into people and strategy when a problem resisted its first explanation.

After leading YayPay to its exit, he also took time to travel. In India, he attended three days of teachings from the Dalai Lama and met Tai Situ Rinpoche. Those experiences belong to the later direction of his work, alongside formal coaching training. His public profile lists IMD study in 2023 and an Associate Certified Coach credential from the International Coaching Federation.

Today, Luminous Leadership lists him as Managing Partner and Council Member. It works with CEOs, founders, family businesses and senior teams facing scale, succession and organisational change. His former YayPay partner, Vyborov, appears on the faculty too. The relationship that began with a request for technical help now continues in a company concerned with how leaders develop.

In June 2026, Venus and IMD’s Susan Goldsworthy published an article drawing on an April survey of 123 senior executives. Respondents valued attention to inner awareness more highly themselves than they believed their organisations did. The sample was concentrated in Europe and among older executives; it provides a view of those participants’ experiences. Their responses gave the authors a concrete way to examine the distance between leadership values and institutional incentives.

There is a continuity here, though it is an interpretation of his career rather than a slogan he has supplied. Strategic Intelligence helped customers understand their surroundings. YayPay helped them see the state of their receivables. Luminous asks leaders to examine how they respond to the organisations they have built. Each depends on making time for something urgency can obscure.

Venus once recommended Susan Scott’s Fierce Conversations, a book about the discussions people need to have. It is a fitting detail for someone whose businesses have involved research, payment communications and now coaching. The conversation changes. Somebody still has to begin it. After years spent helping companies follow up on money, he is working with founders on what deserves their attention next.