Butter Raises $22M to End Accidental Payment Churn
By Vijay Menon, Butter Founder and CEO
2022 was a wild year. We ran headfirst into the worst global macroeconomic headwinds in over a decade — markets sagged, prices skyrocketed, businesses hung on for dear life, and the “era of free money” and good times came to a screeching halt. In short — a lovely time to manage a growing startup.
Today, Butter is proud to both turn the page on last year and also to announce that we have raised $22M in Series A funding led by Norwest Venture Partners! Our existing partners — Atomic, along with Transpose Platform and Spring Tide Capital, also participated in this round. To raise at all in today’s environment — one in which total capital investment has declined an unprecedented 60% in the last quarter alone, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers — is a gift. To raise on these terms is an absolute testament to what we are doing, how we are doing it, and most importantly who we are doing it with here at Butter.
Accidental churn is the single leading cause of subscription churn, resulting in nearly $500B in lost revenue on account of false declines per year. In the race to stem fraud, payments are being falsely declined at artificially inflated rates. Many companies are unaware that this problem exists at all. Even those that do focus on the problem often don’t know how to fix it. The upshot — millions of accidentally churned users.
Payments fail for a variety of reasons — from stolen cards (legitimate) to processor error (not legitimate). Being able to parse through the metadata in real-time to make intelligent decisions around which transactions should and should not be authorized is not an easy task, and subscription businesses today are not equipped to handle this challenge at scale. Butter has built a Recovery engine powered by machine learning that automates these decisions in real time so that you don’t have to.
Every company in the world that transacts digitally is losing revenue to accidental churn.
These organizations each stand to add at least five points to top line revenue. Our vision is to help every e-commerce business on the planet realize this growth. It’s an ambitious goal, but one we firmly stand behind — after all, we’re already delivering this value and more to the customers we serve today.
We’re building a world in which every online business is instantly 5+% more valuable — simply by opening up access to the users who want their service already.
This latter part is important, because while we are proud of the enormous monetary value we’re bringing to enterprise, we’re just as proud of the value we’re delivering to consumers — connecting hundreds of thousands users across the globe with the products and services they love, all while donating a portion of our revenues to the causes that matter to us. We are honored to count the Grameen Foundation, I Stand With the Girls, and the Wild Animal Initiative amongst our earliest partners on this front.
Today’s announcement is a testament to technology, people, and our shared purpose. When I founded Butter over two years ago, I reminded myself constantly of how important it is to love the people we work and build with. More than anything, I’m proud of the incredible culture we have created at Butter — our success is made possible by the Buttertons (or are we Butterflies?) who come into work every day, build world-class products, hold themselves to exceptional standards, and give a damn about the features they are shipping.
At a time when so many others are slowing growth, we feel both fortunate and thrilled to announce our news to the world today. And yes — we are indeed hiring. Perhaps you’ll come and join us, too!
To learn more, visit butterpayments.com.