Slope – a B2B payments platform for enterprise companies – recently announced a $30 million equity round led by Union Square Ventures, with major participation from OpenAI’s Sam Altman. This brings Slope’s combined equity and debt funding to $187 million. The additional participants include monashees, Y Combinator, and Y Combinator-backed startups, including Jack Altman from Lattice, Alex Bouaziz from Deel, Mathilde Collin from Front, Michael Tannenbaum from Brex, and Rujul Zaparde from Zip.
The company offers order-to-cash workflow automation using leading AI tools that power checkout, customer and vendor risk assessment, payment reconciliation, and cash management. And the order-to-cash (O2C) workflow is the backbone of Slope’s automated solution for enterprise companies and starts with a customer order and concludes with successful payment collection. Used by leading companies such as Fiserv, Slope’s AI-driven solutions streamline everything from customer onboarding to invoicing, ensuring seamless execution, accurate transactions, and enhanced customer satisfaction.
Slope’s funding round was preempted by an outsider and resulted in multiple lead offers – quickly becoming oversubscribed by 2x. And this funding round news comes on the heels of Slope’s recent product launch SlopeGPT, the first payments risk model powered by GPT – which went viral within the AI community. And the company also brought on Ashish Jain, a former SoFi and Wall Street executive, as Chief Financial Officer, spearheading risk and financial operations. Slope’s co-founders Lawrence Lin Murata and Alice Deng draw from their AI startup backgrounds in autonomous driving, computer vision, and NLP – uniting as former rivals from Stanford and UC Berkeley to build Slope and digitize the $125 trillion B2B economy.
KEY QUOTES:
“From the beginning, our goal has been to digitize the B2B economy. We started by leveraging AI to solve risk, the most fundamental problem in payments. Halfway through that journey, we realized 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 modernize an industry that’s barely changed for centuries.”
— Lawrence Lin Murata, CEO and co-founder of Slope
“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.”
— Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
“Slope’s pace of growth has been incredibly impressive and we are very excited to double down and deepen our partnership in this round. They’ve quickly found product-market fit and are becoming leaders in the B2B payments space. We wanted them to be able to aggressively lean in when others in their market were playing defense, and now they are in a unique spot to do so.”
— Rebecca Kaden, General Partner at Union Square Ventures and Slope board member
