Helicopter rides, VIP tickets to the K-pop band BTS and all-expense-paid ski trips: That's just a sample of what investors were offering the founders of payments startup Slope to participate in its latest funding round.
CEO Lawrence Lin Murata said the San Francisco-based company initially did not plan to raise another round. Because he and co-founder Alice Deng had kept the company lean, they were comfortable with the $24 million they had raised in April 2022. However, investors were clamoring to get a piece of the company and eventually the perks, as well as participation from one of tech's hottest entrepreneurs. convinced the startup to open up another round.
Slope announced Wednesday it had raised an additional $30 million in an equity round led by Union Square Ventures with participation from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. This brings the company's combined equity and debt funding to $187 million.
Additional participants include Y Combinator and Jack Altman, Sam's brother and CEO of HR software company Lattice, as well as other startup founders.
Lin Murata and Deng, who serves as chief product officer, are both serial Y Combinator founders, having both helmed startups that participated in the accelerator in the past, while Slope itself was a part of YC's summer 2021 batch. The pair met at a joint hackathon they set up while attending rival colleges Berkeley and Stanford.
The company has found a niche for itself as a payment service provider for B2B wholesalers. The company originally focused on offering buy-now-pay-later services to e-commerce businesses but eventually switched to automating payments between businesses.
Part of the hype around the company, at least as investors are concerned, comes with its embrace of generative AI. Slope develops its own large language models and has even built an AI product, SlopeGPT, which assesses the risk involved in payment transactions. The company also uses AI to streamline workflows and match help businesses match invoices with various transactions.
"A lot of what's out there right now and a lot of where the noise is coming from with AI are consumer-facing (tools) or chatbots," Deng said. "But the way we use AI is behind the scenes, solving and automating very bespoke, unsexy B2B workflows."
Deng says the company is committed to on-site work in San Francisco and is currently in the process of upgrading its office space in SoMa. Slope currently has 18 employees and will likely hire more with the new cash, but still plans to keep the team lean and cost-efficient.
