Our investment in Request Finance, the payment infrastructure for B2B crypto payments
Today, Request is announcing a $5.5m Seed round led by Balderton, Animoca Brands and Xange, with participation from renowned web3 entrepreneurs from The Sandbox, Aave, TheGraph among others. Request Finance is an invoice management and payment platform built for finance teams dealing with cryptocurrencies.
In recent years, we have seen the emergence of successful software solutions aimed at simplifying the life of CFOs: from managing employee expenses (Yokoy, Pleo, Spendesk), paying invoices (Melio payments, Libeo), to streamlining accounting (Pennylane), issuing corporate cards, etc. Introducing new software tools into the corporate finance world has allowed finance teams to have better visibility of their data and brought more automation to finance processes. At Balderton, we were fortunate enough to participate in Yokoy’s Series A and B last year, a company which provides finance teams with a 360-degree financial cockpit to manage all business expenses. However, all these tools are designed for traditional web2 companies, which pay and are paid in Euros, Dollars or any other fiat currency (issued by central banks).
With the emergence of cryptocurrencies and decentralised finance, a new payment paradigm is born, without intermediaries and with the potential to reach near-zero transaction costs. A company can now pay a supplier on the other side of the planet without using expensive traditional payment rails. Payments in Bitcoin, Ether or stablecoins are emerging alongside payments in traditional currencies. Of course, for now, this is mostly true for native web3 companies, and Request counts among its customers, NFT companies such as The Sandbox, Defi protocols such as Aave or Paraswap, and more fundamental crypto protocols such as Polygon. But native web3 companies aren’t the only ones getting involved. More and more web2 companies are seeing use cases in crypto, want to pay in crypto, or have counterparties requiring to be paid in crypto to avoid high transaction fees.
Traditional finance tools are not suitable for processing high volumes of crypto payments in a safe and compliant way. In the web3 world, currencies are no longer stored in banks but in wallets. Transactions do not happen on banking protocols like Swift or card schemes like Mastercard but through blockchains. With Request, CFOs can create invoices and manage their contact book of supplier’s wallets. They can pay invoices in batches across 10 different blockchains with +60 cryptocurrencies (DAI, USDC, ETH, etc), and fiat currencies.
Launched in the summer of 2020, Request has not stopped growing exponentially. The company builds in public and publishes a monthly report on its blog with all numbers (May report). A few highlights:
- Request processes $10.5m payment per month
- Request has nearly 2,000 customers
- Request powers a wide variety of crypto payments among which the top 5 are USDC, SAND, USDT, DAI, OCEAN
Beyond numbers, we were impressed by the ambition and crypto expertise of the Request team. Christophe, Yoann and Julien and have been working together for 7 years. In 2015, they were already breaking ground in the crypto world by launching Moneytis, a B2C remittance app relying on Bitcoin to lower transaction fees. Now, they are taking on the finance stack of businesses using crypto. Starting with invoice payment, the Request team has now shipped salary payments, and has processed hundreds of them. Expenses and accounting are next on their roadmap.
At Balderton, we feel honoured to partner with the Request team on their journey of making crypto payments more accessible. If you are a CFO working in crypto, you should have a look at https://www.web3cfo.club/, the first community of Finance & Operations leaders in Web3 that Request just launched.
