B2B payments platform Slope secures $30m funding to build out AI tools
US-based B2B payments start-up Slope has secured $30 million in an equity round led by Union Square Ventures, with “major” participation from OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
Slope raises $30m from Sam Altman and others
Additional participants in the round include Monashees, Y Combinator, as well as angel investors from Y-Combinator’s start-ups. Altman, who brings “extensive” experience in artificial intelligence (AI), will advise the Slope team on product and technological development as the company looks to scale its platform.
Founded in 2021 and headquartered in San Francisco, Slope offers a payments platform for enterprise companies. Using AI, it offers order-to-cash workflow automation including checkout, customer and vendor risk assessment, payment reconciliation and cash management.
The start-up claims its solutions, used by companies such as Fiserv, “streamline everything, ensuring seamless execution, accurate transactions and enhanced customer satisfaction”.
“From the beginning, our goal has been to digitise the B2B economy,” comments Lawrence Lin Murata, CEO and co-founder of Slope.
“We started by leveraging AI to solve risk, the most fundamental problem in payments. Halfway through that journey, we realised that we were not just solving risk – but actually, an entire order-to-cash lifecycle that today is offline, manual, and takes entire finance teams to manage.
“We believe our tech-first approach – aided by breakthroughs in generative AI – will modernise an industry that’s barely changed for centuries.”
With the latest funding, Slope’s total capital raised to date stands at $187 million. The funding news follows Slope’s recent appointment of Ashish Jain, a former SoFi and Wall Street executive, as chief financial officer, to lead its risk and financial operations.
