slopepay, a business-to-business payments platform for businesses, closed a $30 million venture round to expand its business. The company intends to use the new funds on product development as it continues to acquire larger customers.
Since launching in 2021, co-founders Lawrence Lin Murata and Alice Deng have sought to digitize the $2 trillion B125B payments market. The core of Slope's technology is order-to-cash workflow automation using AI-powered tools for payment, customer and supplier risk assessment, payment reconciliation, and cash management.
The new investment follows the recent launch of the SlopeGPT product, which Murata called the first GPT-powered payments risk model.
“Our involvement in AI predates the entire hype cycle of the AI space,” Murata said. “Since before our seed, AI was a great differentiator for us. As we collect more data, we can leverage larger and larger models, so we exchange with GPT, which is incorporated with the AI engine for payment risk modeling, which is an essential aspect of being successful in payments. ».
Slope has had two rounds, an initial one of $8 million in 2021 and $24 million in financing Serie A in 2022. Union Square Ventures, which co-led the Series A, led the new round, which included significant participation from OpenAI's Sam Altman.
"Slope's quest to reshape the B2B payments experience and bring the sector into the digital age is bold, which is why I chose to support them," Altman said in a statement.
In fact, inclusion in the investment was highly sought after, according to CEO Murata. Not only did the company receive multiple offers from oversubscribed investors on several occasions, but it was also ahead of schedule. That last part is rarer these days given the economic environment and the dearth of venture capital investments.
Others joining the round include Y Combinator, Lattice's Jack Altman, Deel's Alex Bouaziz, Front's Mathilde Collin, Brex's Michael Tannenbaum, and Zip's Rujul Zaparde. In total, Slope has raised $187 million in equity and debt.
In those early years, the company worked with startups. Today, the customer base has evolved into an enterprise-based customer base, including Fiserv. As a result, both the company's volume and revenue have grown 17-fold since last year, Deng said.
“In order for people to adapt to the world of B2B digital payments, we really need to make the transition a seamless experience,” Murata said. “We don't see AI as central to the user experience. Instead, we actually see it as an invisible experience that helps automate and streamline processes, even if they are not aware of what technology is happening behind it.”
