Anil Stocker is co-founder and chief executive of Kriya, the London, England, provider of invoice finance and B2B pay-later terms that he started as MarketInvoice in 2011. "My heart really lay in helping small-business owners scale," he told Elite Business in 2017. Read our review of Kriya.
Growing Up in Switzerland
He is half Swiss and half Indian, and the Indian side of his family is from Kenya. "As a young kid, I was hearing a lot of conversations about people starting companies and the trials and tribulations they faced," he said. He moved to the UK with his family at 13. At school he ran a Young Enterprise company selling alumni cufflinks, and he jokes that it was where he first came across working capital: customers sent their cheques before the cufflinks had been made.
Early Career at Lehman Brothers
He studied economics at Trinity College, Cambridge, England, where he met his co-founders Charles Delingpole and Ilya Kondrashov. In 2006 he joined a Lehman Brothers private equity fund, working with finance directors on cash flow forecasts, then moved to the smaller investment firm Cogent Partners shortly before Lehman collapsed in 2008. "Culturally I didn't really feel like I belonged in the big investment banks," he said.
Starting MarketInvoice
In 2010 he began meeting small-business owners, about 50 of them by his count, and heard the same complaints about cash and the banks. He chose invoice finance because, as he told Fintech One-on-One, "for many businesses their only assets that they have are their invoices." MarketInvoice let investors fund those invoices online. "We are giving time back to the business owners so they can focus on what their passion is," he said.
From MarketInvoice to Kriya
The company later renamed itself Kriya as it moved into payment terms that B2B sellers offer their business buyers at checkout. Allica Bank bought it in October 2025, and he stayed on to run it under its own brand.
He also invests as an angel in more than 20 start-ups across fintech, open banking, B2B marketplaces and crypto.
