Artificial intelligence-powered business-to-business payments platform startup Slope Inc. today announced that it has raised $30 million in new funding to fuel product development and expansion.

Founded in 2021, Slope offers a B2B payments platform designed to deliver smoother transactions between enterprises. The service aims to simplify the often complex process of B2B payments, enabling companies to focus on their core operations.

Slope’s platform provides secure payment processing with AI support, which is used to detect fraudulent activities and optimize transaction workflows. It uses generative AI to power B2B checkout, customer and vendor risk assessment, payment reconciliation and cash management to drive digital transformation.

The company argues that its use of AI not only solves risk, a fundamental issue in the payments industry, but also assists in the entire order-to-cash lifecycle. Currently it’s mostly offline and manual and often requires entire finance teams to manage.

Core to the platform is Slope’s order-to-cash workflow, an automated solution for enterprise companies that begins with a customer order and concludes with successful payment collection. The platform is used by companies to streamline customer onboarding to invoicing, ensuring accurate transactions and enhanced customer satisfaction.

The company’s AI service, SlopeGPT, was launched in April and is said to categorize bank data more accurately than its counterparts, providing a higher-resolution picture of a business and improved risk detection.

Union Square Ventures led the round, with OpenAI LP’s Sam Altman, Y Combinator Management LLC and various individuals also participating. “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, who is the chief executive of OpenAI, said in a statement.

The funding takes the total amount raised by Slope, including venture capital funding and debt financing, to $187 million. The new funding will be used to build additional tools to assist companies through every transaction stage and to invest in marketing.

Image: Slope