There are many companies that bring one-click pay to the direct-to-consumer marketplace, but few develop comparable tools for the business-to-business marketplace. B2B Payment Volume is five times larger than retail payments from businesses to consumers, but many of those payments are not made online.
That’s true Balance comes in. Co-founded by former PayPal employees Bar Geron and Yoni Shuster, the company supports B2B e-commerce merchants and marketplaces by digitizing these capabilities through one-click payment tools, allowing businesses to get paid instantly, process any payment method, and offer flexible terms. .
We profiled the two-year-old company last year when it raised $25 million in Series A funds led by Ribbit Capital. Now Balance is back with $56 million in Series B funding, this time led by Forerunner. The new investment gives the company $87 million in total funding raised to date.
“For years, consumers have been leading the way in modernizing our transactions, but innovation in B2B commerce has lagged far behind the B2C space,” Kirsten Green, founder and managing partner at Forerunner, said in a written statement. “There is incredible potential to modernize broad aspects of how B2B commerce is conducted in the digital age, and the market opportunities are enormous – only 7% of the $120 trillion B2B payment volume is conducted digitally today.”
The new round joins Salesforce Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Lyra Ventures, Gramercy Ventures and a group of B2B ecommerce leaders as angel investors, including former Shopify CMO Jeff Wisener and Faire co-founder and CTO Marcelo Cortes. Ribbit, as well as other existing investors Lightspeed Ventures, Avid Ventures, Upwest and Jibe, also participated in the Series B.
“The momentum in the business is being felt in real time,” CEO Geron told londonbusinessblog.com. “While we got a big Series A round, with the new economy and challenges, we made the right move to do another round sooner or later. Now we have the lifespan to cross that next step.”
Last year, Balance was still in its infancy, although my colleague Mary Ann Azevedo reported that the company had 30 employees and has seen growth of about 500% to 600% since the launch of its business in February 2021.
Today, the company has nearly 70 employees and partners with hundreds of merchants and dozens of B2B marketplaces — a 10-fold increase from last year, Geron said. It focuses on legacy industries that are not as digitally savvy in payments, including timber, chemicals, steel, retail and food.
Some of its clients include timber marketplace MaterialsXchange, chemical supply marketplace ChemDirect, wholesale marketplace Abound, and restaurant ordering platform notch.
Balance will use this funding for customer acquisition and to grow its team across go-to-market, engineering, sales, customer success, product and engineering and operations. Geron plans to increase the workforce to around 100 by the end of the year.
Overall, the checkout area reflects a new phase of the economy, Geron added. Commoditized goods are now traded online but face an inefficient market.
“It’s not like B2C, you can’t go online and find thousands of steel suppliers,” he said. “We are taking the next step in e-commerce and doing so for the entire supply chain. Now Balance allows you to do self-service transactions in ways that were previously only available in B2C channels.”