“B2B payment is a cool thing”, said no business ever – so the PayPal veterans founded Balance
Photo: Unsplash
You will be surprised, but not only you like to buy online from small and large businesses – businesses also like to buy from other online businesses. The problem is that B2B payments are not a simple process like taking a credit card and paying for items in your cart a la Amazon, but a process full of “current plus”, bureaucracy and other headaches. So the Israeli startup Balance decided that it wanted to solve this problem with some ideas that every business owner would love to hear about.
Pay with a current plus, feel without a current plus
If you were wondering what businesses buy from other businesses, then it’s not about AirTag, cool t-shirts and new remotes for PlayStation 5, but it’s about steel, wood, chemicals, food, and more. These are things that cost a lot, but a lot of money, and in the meantime quite a few marketplaces have been opened that are intended for the sale of these raw materials and products – only that, as mentioned, they are really not as simple as Amazon. Balance offers a Check Out system for those marketplaces, so that when a business reaches the end of the purchase, it can pay however it wants: check, bank transfer, credit card, with payments, with check layout. In short, being without and feeling with – only the twist is that the other party also gets the money immediately.
The people behind Balance are Barr Giron and Yoni Shuster, PayPal veterans, who founded the new baby in 2020, right with the meteoric rise of online purchases, when vendors suddenly couldn’t travel around the world. In a conversation with Gigtime, Giron says that despite the successful launch, they too feel the difficulties of the supply chains first hand, and claims that specific industries such as shipping and steel suffer from difficult challenges.
And what is the difference between you and other fintech companies active in the field? What is your specialty?
Giron: “We are very focused on solving the complete experience of B2B trade online. This means that we manage the entire checkout experience – credit cards, bank payments, invoicing, and also that the place where we give credit is only to support the existing Flow of Trade, meaning payment terms as used in 90% of B2B transactions.”
Photo: Balance
Today (Tuesday) Balance announces the completion of a $56 million B fundraising round led by Forerunner and with the participation of Hubspot Ventures, Lyra Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Ribbit, Lightspeed, Avid Ventures, Upwest, Jibe, and Gramercy Ventures. Among others, the former CMO of Shopify and the CTO of a B2B marketplace called Faire also participated in the recruitment round. So far the company has raised 87 million dollars, and it employs 60 people in its offices in Israel and New York.
Idan Ben Tovim
Born with a joystick in his hand. He has far too many gadgets and far too little free time to play with them all. Has an unexplained hammer for performing instrument battery calibrations. When he’s not busy writing about technology, he likes to talk about it, and a lot
