Slope Raises $30 Million to Scale AI-Powered B2B Payments Platform

Slope has secured $30 million in an equity round to scale its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered payments platform for B2B businesses.

The round was led by Union Square Ventures, and there was participation from Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Slope said in a Wednesday (Sept. 27) press release emailed to PYMNTS.

Altman will advise Slope on product and technological development, sharing his AI experience, according to the release.

“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,” Altman said in the release.

Slope’s B2B platform includes consumer-grade checkout processes, customer and vendor risk assessment, payment reconciliation, and cash management, according to the release.

It uses AI tools to power these functions, delivering order-to-cash workflow automation, the release said. The platform streamlines everything from customer onboarding to invoicing.

“We started by leveraging AI to solve risk, the most fundamental problem in payments,” Slope CEO and Co-founder Lawrence Lin Murata said in the release. “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.”

The Slope platform is used by companies like Fiserv, per the release. Its latest funding round brings its total funding to $187 million and comes on the heels of the company’s launch of SlopeGPT, a payments risk model powered by GPT.

Rebecca Kaden, general partner at Union Square Ventures and board member at Slope, said in the release that Slope’s pace of growth has been “impressive.”

“They’ve quickly found product-market fit and are becoming leaders in the B2B payments space,” Kaden said.

PYMNTS Intelligence found that 90% of chief financial officers want to widen the scope of automation in their accounts receivable (AR) processes. AR automation is helping businesses stay a step ahead on liquidity, providing a hedge against economic qualms, according to “Accounts Receivable Automation Smooths Order-to-Cash Continuum,” a PYMNTS and Corcentric collaboration.

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