Slope announced it has closed $65 million in a new round of funding, bringing the total funding to $252 million ($77 million in equity and $175 million in debt). This funding round will be used for scaling operations as the B2B payments platform continues serving many of the world’s largest enterprises. Along with J.P. Morgan Payments, other participants in the round include Y Combinator, Jack Altman, and Max Altman’s new fund Saga.
Slope is a B2B payments platform for enterprise companies, offering order-to-cash automation using leading AI tools that power checkout, customer and vendor risk assessment, embedded short-term financing, and payment reconciliation.
J.P. Morgan Payments has picked Slope to help offer clients access to a short-term financing solution that offers an extension of payment terms to such clients’ business customers, powered by Slope’s platform. And Slope will join the J.P. Morgan Payments Partner Network, which offers end-to-end payment experiences through an ecosystem of third-party applications that can grow businesses faster. J.P. Morgan will also provide a debt facility to help the business achieve additional scale.
J.P. Morgan Payments combines treasury services, trade and working capital and card and merchant services capabilities to help clients pay customers or employees in different currencies around the world. And it processes nearly $10 trillion payments daily, operating in over 160 countries and over 120 currencies, and is #1 in USD payments volume.
Lawrence Lin Murata and Alice Deng launched Slope in late 2021 and built an exceptional team in Silicon Valley.
And now as part of its growth strategy and vision, Slope is launching SlopeAI. SlopeAI makes Slope’s AI underwriting platform available for financial institutions and wholesalers looking to onboard, underwrite, and monitor their business clients faster and more seamlessly. And this includes access to Slope’s LLMs for bank data enrichment (SlopeGPT, TransFormer), KYB/KYC powered by AI agents and internal production risk models that have yet to be announced. Slope is already working with some of the largest regional banks in the United States to launch these capabilities.
KEY QUOTES:
“We announced our round late last year and were not looking to raise additional capital. However, working closely with J.P. Morgan, one of the world’s largest banks, represented a unique opportunity. We are excited to join the J.P. Morgan Payments Partner Network, with the equity investment and debt facility helping to support future growth. Working with J.P. Morgan will help us advance our technology so we can better serve more members of the Fortune 500. Slope embodies ‘Fin-Tech’ to the very core and is well positioned to win the opportunity to digitize the $125 trillion B2B economy.”
- Lawrence Lin Murata, CEO and co-founder of Slope
“The U.S. embedded finance market is determined to be worth $20 billion, with many corporates looking to implement solutions that reduce friction, streamline processes and support origination. Working with Slope, our team at J.P. Morgan Payments can help meet client demand by providing access to a financing solution that integrates directly into the point-of-sale, translating into higher conversion rates. By combining J.P. Morgan’s fortress balance sheet and depth of client relationships with Slope’s strengths in underwriting and credit risk monitoring as well as platform flexibility, we are a well-positioned partner to meet our clients’ needs in a rapidly evolving market.”
- James Fraser, Global Head of Trade & Working Capital at J.P. Morgan Payments
