Slope announces our $30M round from USV and Sam Altman
We are excited to announce our $30M round led by Union Square Ventures, with major participation from OpenAI’s Sam Altman, bringing our combined equity and debt funding to $187 million.
The past two years have flown by, and I wanted to take some time to reflect on our journey, starting with how it all began.
How it started
Growing up, I would spend my school breaks helping my parents in their shop in Brazil. They spent the last three decades in the wholesale business, pouring their heart and soul into a toy shop that imported and sold to other small businesses. One of my strongest memories of that time was the stacks of paper used for everything: sales, the cashier, administrative paperwork, invoices, and so on. It stuck with me how manual, painful, and messy transactions between businesses could be.
The problem was made worse when COVID hit in 2020. Suddenly, the in-person interactions my parents depended on were brought to a halt, and they were forced to rethink how to run their operations and explore digitizing to navigate an increasingly virtual world.
However, as we looked into solutions to help bring their payments online, we learned that existing B2B payment solutions and experiences are excruciating. They are riddled with poor user experiences, require complex integrations, and lack basic B2B payment features such as payment flexibility.
My co-founder, Alice, and I saw this as an opportunity for change. As we educated ourselves further on the B2B payments space, we learned that today’s archaic B2B payments infrastructure is one of the reasons why B2B digitization has lagged behind B2C digitization. Although the B2B economy is larger, with $125 trillion in transactions globally every year, only 5% of that volume is online today and is primarily transacted through cash or paper checks.
Inspired by the opportunity for impactful change, we started with this idea of building butter for B2B payments. It was crazy to us how business owners like my parents have seamless B2C e-commerce experiences on Amazon as consumers but, on the other hand, have to handle stacks of paperwork for B2B payments as business owners. We wanted to make B2B payments equally as frictionless.
As we built solutions to address our merchants’ challenges and integrated deeper into their operations, we realized that payment processing itself was just one part of a larger set of challenges businesses face when moving online. In fact, the entire back-office experience for managing payments is complex and requires bespoke solutions that are difficult to work with. Hence, we expanded our product suite into automating order-to-cash workflow — customer onboarding, invoicing, credit risk management, collections management, and reconciling everything seamlessly with their ERP system.
Our journey so far
Along our research process, we met merchants who experienced these exact pain points, and we signed multiple contracts to begin solving their problems. Having found product-market fit, these initial customers helped jumpstart our growth, and we raised our seed round shortly thereafter. Just six months later, with only a team of four people, we closed our $24M Series A.
Our first team members (👋Alex and Gabe) only joined us when we were almost $1M in annual run rate, as we wanted to preserve iteration speed. We’ve found that being disciplined and intentional about staying lean has paid massive dividends. It’s pretty incredible that our revenue is 8 figures, and we’re currently 18 people with an APE (ARR per employee) that rivals public companies.
We wouldn’t be where we are today without our amazing team, and while we plan to continue growing, we don’t plan to be a team of 100 people anytime soon. This is not because of a lack of job openings or applicants; rather it is because we are extremely selective in our hiring. To date, we have given out 20 job offers and continue to hire for “slope.”
If you get a chance to visit our office, you’ll find that our culture is rooted in camaraderie, creativity, and pushing the boundaries. We’ve made the decision to be in-office but keep it light and fun. We have a shoes-off policy, an office shrine, and plenty of other quirky traditions — like in-office competitions and internal burpee rankings. We are committed to creating an environment where our team can work hard but also play hard, so they can push boundaries while having fun.
You may find us white-river rafting and skiing at our offsites, but you’ll also often find us heads down in our office focused on building a best-in-class product. 100% of our team ships code and/or talks directly with our users daily. We were able to get to this scale without a sales or marketing hire as everyone incorporates these roles into their day-to-day, which allows us to iterate quickly and remain close to our customers and our mission.
What’s next
We’re only just getting started and can’t wait to see where this journey continues to take us. We still have funds from last year’s round in the bank and were not planning to raise anytime soon, but when the opportunity presented itself, we grabbed it inspired by the words of Warren Buffet: “Be fearful when others are greedy and greedy when others are fearful.” These funds will enable us to continue playing on the offense, conquering opportunities when incumbents and competitors are on the defense. As we continue to scale and build out our product, go-to-market, and operations, we’d love to share this journey with others.
Specifically, we would like to highlight our current open roles: Customer Success Manager, Customer Success Operations, and Product Counsel. In this next phase of Slope, we plan to have a laser-sharp focus on building an enduring, category-defining business.
We strongly believe that we are positioned to win the opportunity to digitize the $125T B2B economy.
Reaching these milestones wouldn’t have been possible without the incredible support of our partners, investors, and network. Thank you to our investors Y Combinator, USV, monashees, Sam Altman, Stanley Tang from Doordash, Arash Ferdowsi from Dropbox, Zach Perret and William Hockey from Plaid, Jack Altman from Lattice, Alex Bouaziz from Deel, David Helgason from Unity, Eric Wu from Opendoor, Mathilde Collin from Front, Michael Tannenbaum from Brex, Rujul Zaparde from Zip, and many more. I’m very grateful to all who have been with us throughout our journey, and look forward to what the future holds for Slope.
To stay connected and see more of what we’re up to, visit our website at www.slopepay.com and follow us on Twitter: @SlopePay and LinkedIn: Slope.
— LLM, CEO of Slope
It’s not where you start, it’s how fast you iterate. Slope is more important than the Y-intercept.
