London has overtaken every other European city as the continent’s top destination for startup founders, capturing 32.6% of the vote in the 2025 Startup Heatmap Europe Report. That magnetic pull convinced Adam Barbera, a Barcelona native, to relocate his fintech company’s headquarters to the UK capital.
Barbera co-founded Dost, a fintech startup deploying AI to eliminate the manual grind of company paperwork and administrative tasks. Rather than having finance teams key in invoice details by hand or chase down approvals, the software handles those workflows automatically. The timing matters because e-invoicing mandates are rolling out across Europe, forcing businesses to rethink how they process financial documents.
Dost closed a $7.8 million Series A round in late 2025, led by Octopus Ventures. Barbera made the move to London in early 2026 to spearhead UK expansion. Before launching the company in 2021, he worked at SAP as an account executive, where he saw firsthand how accounts payable teams struggled with existing software. He later met his co-founders, Fernando Martín and Naqqash Abbassi, at Tech Data.
The company positions itself as “AI-native,” meaning intelligence sits at the platform’s core rather than bolted onto legacy template systems. Dost reads financial documents at line-item level from the very first invoice, with no configuration required. The startup reports 95% extraction accuracy, 80% cost reduction, and 90% time saved for its customers, having processed more than five million transactions.
London’s appeal goes beyond prestige. Barbera points out that every serious fintech player maintains a presence there, creating a network that connects European and American markets. Meanwhile, the UK still lags behind Italy, Poland, and France on e-invoicing infrastructure, with PDFs and paper invoices still dominant. The UK mandate arrives in April 2029, and businesses that wait until 2028 to assess their invoice data flows risk falling behind.
Barbera’s biggest concern isn’t technology readiness but human resistance to change. When AI adoption stalls, he argues, the blocker is rarely the model or integration. It’s people unwilling to alter how they work, even when they complain about current processes. That insight shapes how Dost approaches every customer deployment.
