FinTech news in B2B category

After years watching deals falls through due to a lack of payment flexibility, they left Motive to build Vartana, aiming to equip companies with a managed platform that helps sales reps close deals. Vartana also secured a $50 million line of credit from i80 Group, which Kella says will ensure financed deals can be managed through Vartana’s new capital marketplace. Vartana helps to manage tasks like contract tracking, payment terms and signature capture, accepting a range of different payment options (e.g., pay in full, deferred payment) and installment plans. But he doesn’t see them as direct competitors, pointing out that Vartana’s model hinges on delivering financing to buyers and targeting late-stage tech companies.

The above makes Nichole Wischoff something of an exception: Her solo venture capital firm Wischoff Ventures closed a second fund of $20 million, a sizable increase from her first $5 million fund. According to a summary of an analysis that Wischoff conducted, family offices now account for more than half of her second fund, compared to about a third of her first fund. Beyond fintech Wischoff’s existing portfolio includes companies such as Coast Pay, Loop, Nuvo, Trustlayer and Vesta – a heavy fintech leaning owing to Wischoff’s background. Backers of this new fund include Peter Thiel, Lee Fixel, Yahoo co-founder Jerry Chen, Bain Capital, Byers Capital, Cendana Capital, Crossover, Insight Partners and others.

Facing the headwinds, rather than pull out of BNPL altogether, investors appear to be shifting bets to what they perceive as a safer subcategory of BNPL: business-to-business (B2B) BNPL. The beneficiaries are startups like OatFi, which today emerged from stealth with $8 million in new equity and $50 million in debt for its platform that provides working capital infrastructure for B2B payments platforms.

In this, Sequence and its investors believe the startup is an early mover in building building payments software that allows businesses to capture data in real time and to feed that into dynamic pricing and payments flows. The role of no-code and low-code software has often been described in terms of being more efficient, or just to cut through red tape in helping non-technical people get more hands-on with the digital products they are themselves using, but it has more recently taken on a more pragmatic, fiscally-minded purpose: at a time when companies are reevaluating their spend on new product and projects and how they allocate their talent resources, services like billing and payments are also getting revisited. Sequence, which wants to create what it describes as a new kind of FinOps stack for B2B businesses — APIs and other tools to create more responsive pricing, billing and related services, leveraging data and analytics to do so — has raised $19 million, a seed round that it will be using to continue developing its products and hiring more talent. Companies like Stripe, Paddle and Modern Treasury have opened the door to making it easier for digital businesses — which are not necessarily at their core payments and billing companies — to use APIs to incorporate more modern payments, billing, reconciliation and other revenue-related services into their financial stack.

Kontempo, a startup offering buy now, pay later (BNPL) and interest-free installment plans to business-to-business (B2B) customers, today announced that it raised a $30 million seed round in a mix of equity ($6.5 million) and debt ($25 million).

After living and working in the United States for almost 25 years, he moved back to Bangladesh in 2018 to digitize micro-credit, with the goal of creating a digital credit platform for micro-merchants that did not require a smartphone or digital literacy.

The round brings Fashinza’s total raised to $135 million, which Gupta says is being used to refine the company’s supply chain technology and expand into new markets, including raw materials procurement. In an endorsement of Fashinza’s approach to supply chain management, the company today announced that it raised $100 million in Series B funding ($60 million in equity and $40 million in debt).

By offering invoice and recurring revenue financing, Crowdz says it wants to help SMEs have a greater shot at success by opening up access to capital. The company’s latest financing is part of an ongoing $200 million investment from Citi into technology creating social impact, and was led by its Spread Products Investment Technologies (SPRINT) team, the strategic investing arm of the bank’s Global Spread Products division.

Much of Lyric core team regrouped and decided to focus on building out what is today Wheelhouse, as the remote work environment precipitated by the COVID-19 pandemic led to more people seeking longer-term rentals.

The NFT market was worth $41 billion at the end of last year — nearly as large as the conventional art market by some estimates — and it’s expected to nearly double in size by the end of 2022, according to a report released this week by blockchain analytics firm Nansen.

Quick thoughts: This is another area that YC clearly sees as beginning to show promise, with past YC companies that include CrowdForce (which raised $3.6 million in funding last month) and Kudi (it raised $55 million last summer at a $500 million valuation). Blocknom Website: https://blocknom.com Founded: 2021 Location: Jakarta, Indonesia Team size: 6 Promises include: Providing an alternative payment infrastructure without the need for a payment card or consumer app so that customers can pay businesses from their phones without internet access. Among them is Mina Shahid, co-founder and CEO, who says he is a two-time founder and previously worked with co-founder Ben Best at another lending company in Ghana that failed.

Vartana plans to use its equity funding to work on its product roadmap, which involves adding more staff to its current headcount of 17 across engineering, operations and sales.