Slope recently closed $30 million in equity funding. Led by Lawrence Lin Murata, CEO, Slope is a B2B payments platform offering order-to-cash workflow automation for enterprise companies.
It enables businesses to manage transactions, optimize payment processes, and enhance customer experiences by integrating AI tools into the order-to-cash workflow. The system uses generative AI to power B2B checkout, customer and vendor risk assessment, payment reconciliation, and cash management. The company’s solutions are used by companies like Fiserv (NYSE: FI).
$125 Trillion in Payments Digitized
Since launching in 2021, co-founders Lawrence Lin Murata and Alice Deng have sought to digitize the $125 trillion B2B payments market. According Raynor de Best,content expert covering payments and (crypto)currencies:
“Regardless whether it is for the United States or the global perspective, the revenue found in the B2B payments market was far bigger than in B2C. The global B2B market, for instance, was estimated to be worth around 125 trillion U.S. dollars of which 25 trillion U.S. dollars was located in the United States. Interestingly, it is in the B2C side that most of the developments with digital payments occurred in recent years – such as contactless payments or mobile wallets. This was less so in the B2B segment, where not the payments themselves are the main focus but rather the transaction process, data required to make payments happen, or the administrative workflow.”
Ahead of the AI Boom
“Our involvement in AI predates all the AI hype cycle,” Murata said. “Since before our seed, AI was a big differentiator for us. As we collect more data, we are able to leverage larger and larger models, so we swapped GPT, which is building on top of GPT embeddings for payments risk, which is an essential application for succeeding between payments.”
The round, which brought Slope’s combined equity and debt funding to $187m, was led by Union Square Ventures, with participation from OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Jack Altman from Lattice, Alex Bouaziz from Deel, Mathilde Collin from Front, Michael Tannenbaum from Brex, and Rujul Zaparde from Zip.
“Slope’s quest to reshape the B2B payments experience and bring the sector into the digital age is audacious — and that’s why I chose to back them,” Altman said in a written statement.
15-Fold Increase in Two Years
After a record 15-fold increase in gross merchandise volume in 30 days in 2021 and $8 million in seed funding, Slope has been growing steadily. In those early years, the company worked with startups. Today the customer pipeline has evolved into mainly enterprise, including Fiserv. As a result, both volume and company revenue have increased 17x since last year.
With such achievements, inclusion in the investment was highly sought after, according to CEO Murata. Not only did the company get multiple offers from investors and was multiple times oversubscribed, it was also preempted. That last part is more rare these days given the economic environment and drying up of venture capital investments.
