Slope, which provides businesses an easy way to offer buy now, pay later services, has had a busy six months. The buy now, pay later market size was valued at $16 billion in 2021, and is poised to grow six times by 2029.
The businesses can be approved in seconds with its technology. Customers choose the payment terms that work for them. Slope will pay out the business once the product or service ships.
The biggest thing that has happened is growth, according to company founders Alice Deng and Lawrence Murata. During that six-month period, they saw 121% growth month over month and signed up enough enterprise customers to grow more than 20 times in the quarter.
We have gone from a minimum viable product to scaling on enterprise partners, so we are going to do a huge push in hiring, which is something we were not doing before, so we can build out things so that more customers can be onboarded.
Slope takes in first capital with visions of being ‘Stripe for global B2B payments’
Slope process. Slope
B2B merchant partners include Blue Pallet and Go4U, and it is now enabling financing for over 2,500 businesses in the U.S. and Mexico. Customers are seeing an average order increase of 168%, which is three times the basket size. Slope is taking 26% of the total gross merchandise value of the marketplace, which Deng said was very promising.
Businesses are shifting payments online and their customers are becoming more comfortable paying via that method as a result of the global pandemic. Slope is different from other financial providers in that it focuses on a developer-focused approach, and that others are taking a finance-focused approach.
Slope wanted a process where businesses didn't have to fill out a 20-question form or wait days to be approved for buy now, pay later. The technology integration takes less time than the underwriting process, which takes seconds.
A new round of funding, co-led by Union Square Ventures and Monashees, with participation from Tiger Global Management, Global Founders Capital and a group of executives from companies including DoorDash, was announced today. $32 million is the total funding of the company.
Slope intends to use most of the new funding to hire and scale. It has a small team of eight and plans to grow that to 30 over the next five months.
Slope has a CFO. Slope
The chief financial officer is one of the new hires. Jain was most recently senior vice president of C2FO, overseeing capital markets, card products and corporate development. He started his career atDeutsche Bank and was head of capital markets at SoFi.
Many of the marketplaces he spoke with were happy and enthusiastic about the product, which was one of the reasons that drew Jain to the company.
With the B2B market growing faster than the B2C market, there is plenty of data to analyze. We are solving for B2B through a buy now, pay later product that brings emerging technology to the marketplace and access to capital to grow. We are building a customer-first technology that will help democrat access to the digital economy.
Rebecca Kaden, managing partner at Union Square Ventures, said that there needs to be some fundamental infrastructure for businesses to move online. Slope benefits from two-level growth, as customers get bigger, it scales with them and gets new customers along the way. Slope's product is faster and easier to implement, which is a category advantage, and its growth rate reflects that.
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