When it comes to fintech, consumers have been paying a lot of attention over the past decade, with banking, lending, investment and other legacy services receiving disruptive treatment. But at the same time, there is a growing trend to build more for the B2B market, and today one of the new hopefuls in that space is announcing funding ahead of its official launch in Q4 of this year.
As a new FinOps stack for B2B businesses — an order it seeks to create what it describes as a new FinOps stack — APIs and other tools to create more responsive pricing, invoicing and related services, using data and analytics — it has raised $19 million, and will continue to hire more talent to develop its products in a seed round.
The order is based out of London, England, and the funding comes from an impressive list of investors considering the company is just starting out.
Andreessen Horowitz – a Silicon Valley firm that has recently become more active in Europe – is leading the round, with Salesforce Ventures, Firstminute Capital, Crew Capital, Passion Capital, Dig Ventures, Fin Capital, and 9Yards also participating; Angels in the round include the founders of Plaid, Intercom, Jeeves, Gocard Alba, Marshmallow, Lendable, Hoppin, Yupaz, Monzo, Comply and other unnamed founders.
Reports of this race round and A16Z’s involvement surfaced a year ago, with some of the attention not only coming from a big-name fan, but also the history of the founders. CEO Ria Grover founded a ‘cloud canteen’ startup called Fidir, which was previously sold to Compass Group. Meanwhile, co-founder Eamon Jubawai, who is also chairman, co-founded identity verification startup Onfido. In any case, at the time, the funding had yet to close and finally, many investors and large amounts.
A little note on the valuation: Previous reports have pegged Sequison’s price at $50 million-$60 million, but Grover said in an interview last week that the startup would not disclose the price. However, I would point out that there are two factors that could skew that number. Last year the “cost of capital” definitely increased and put pressure on the general valuations. But on the other hand, also last year, Sequence launched its private beta and is already announcing a few early adopters such as Deliveroo, Pipe, Snyk and Reachdesk.
Companies like Stripe, Paddle, and Modern Treasury have opened the door for digital businesses — not just in their core payments and billing organizations — to make it easier to use APIs for more modern payments, invoicing, reconciliation, and other revenue-related services. Stack of money. The opportunity that Sequence is targeting is related to all of these but it is targeting a different gap in the market.
As Grover explained to me, it’s one thing for a company to make it easy to integrate payment flow into a product. What’s being planned for ordering, however, is making it easier to build more personalized pricing and payment services for customers, and for some time, it’s not unlike what businesses have been doing in e-commerce.
It does this by integrating third-party applications like Salesforce, Hubspot, Xero, Netsuite, and other third-party applications to leverage payment and transaction data that business customers may have in their systems but fail to analyze and proactively act upon. Quickbooks. (And it’s focused on the two main ways businesses pay for goods and services — bank payments or debit rather than card payments — for the payments themselves. Payments software that allows businesses to capture real-time data and feed that into dynamic pricing and payment flows.
On top of that, the sequence is built as a “low code” service, bypassing the need for developers to build, test and ship changes.
“When you’re building new products and pricing plans in a B2B environment, you always want an interface that’s reliable for developers,” she says. “We’re empowering operators to improve themselves.”
The role of codeless and low-code software is often described in terms of being more efficient or simply cutting red tape in helping non-technical people better understand the digital products they use themselves. Recently, it has taken on a more practical fiscal-minded purpose: As companies reevaluate how they spend on new products and projects and how they allocate their talent resources, services such as billing and payments are also being re-examined.
Order cites figures from Notion Capital, which estimate that B2B businesses today spend a staggering 7% to 9% of their revenue building account and payments infrastructure, and that requires implementing engineers, not just software or SaaS investments.
“We saw an acute pain point and a compelling opportunity around automating and managing payments and cash management,” Seema Amble, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said in a statement. “The sequence team really impressed us with a strong team and an early client who was excited about the vision.”
