Balance, a platform that tries to create a B2B checkout experience similar to a B2C experience, has announced that it has raised $25 million in Series A funding which will help to add more features to its platform.
The funding was led by Ribbit Capital and other investors in the round included Avid Ventures, Lightspeed Ventures, and others. The mission of the company is to make the B2B checkout experience to be similar to that of a B2C platform like Amazon and remove the challenges faced by businesses in getting payments. B2C payments are very different from B2B payments as B2C payments happen right at the moment of purchase and the goods are delivered after the purchase. But in B2B payment space, the payments generally move on 30-day cycles and credit cards are also avoided for use in payments as they lead to additional charges.
“The only element that keeps many merchants offline is payments,” said Bar Geron, a co-founder at Balance. “It’s a process that is stuck in the flow of those marketplaces and keeping them from scaling. We got fascinated with the problem.”
Such delayed payments can affect a lot of businesses, especially small ones, and the problems could be so bad as to take them out of business. Balance tries to solve this problem by offering a very big range of payment options to the buyer including ACH, payment cards, wires, and other methods as well. The foundation of this solution is built on Stripe but the Balance platform offers many more payment options than Stripe. Balance also manages to underwrite these payments using credit checks and this greatly helps the businesses to get their payments on time.
Geron added: “Global B2B trade being done mostly offline is resulting in high cost of living and economic inefficiencies, worldwide. We are at the very early innings of a massive shift from offline to online, across industries. Our goal is to facilitate this transition with an amazing transaction experience for businesses and suppliers, making it a no-brainer for every B2B business to start selling online.”
The startup has already partnered with Magento and BigCommerce and it would be using its funding for growth and adding more product features and also expanding on its APIs which can be used by the merchants within their own platforms to access the various features and products that Balance offers from within their platform.
