Sequence orders up $19M led by A16Z for a new approach to B2B fintech • TechCrunch

When it comes to fintech, consumers have received the most attention over the past decade, with banking, credit, investment and other legacy services receiving the disruption treatment. But at the same time, there has been a growing trend to build more for the B2B market, and today one of the newer hopefuls in this space is announcing funding ahead of a public launch in Q4 this year.

Sequence, which wants to create what it describes as a new kind of FinOps stack for B2B companies – APIs and other tools to create more responsive pricing, billing and related services, leveraging data and analytics to do so – has gathered raised $19 million, a seed round that it will use to continue developing its products and hire more talent.

Sequence is based out of London, England, and the funding comes from an impressive list of investors, considering the company has yet to launch.

Andreessen Horowitz – the Silicon Valley firm that has recently become more active in Europe – is leading the round, with Salesforce Ventures, Firstminute Capital, Crew Capital, Passion Capital, Dig Ventures, Fin Capital and 9Yards also participating; angels in the round include the founders of Plaid, Intercom, Jeeves, GoCardless, Marshmallow, Lendable, Hopin, UiPath, Monzo, Comply and others who shall not be named.

Reports of this seed round, and A16Z’s involvement, actually surfaced about a year ago, and some of the attention came not only from the big man behind it, but also the founders’ track record. Riya Grover, CEO, previously founded a “cloud canteen” startup called Feedr that sold to Compass Group; meanwhile, co-founder Eamon Jubbawy, who is chairman, had co-founded identity verification startup Onfido. Anyway, at that time the funding had not yet closed and eventually ended up with more investors and in a larger size.

Small note on valuation: the previous reports pegged Sequence’s valuation at $50 million-$60 million, but Grover said in an interview last week that the startup would not disclose its valuation. However, I would like to point out that there are a couple of factors that can influence this figure. The “cost of capital” has definitely gone up in the last year and put pressure on valuations in general. But on the other hand, also in the last year, Sequence has launched its private beta and reveals a few early adopters such as Deliveroo, Pipe, Snyk and Reachdesk.

Companies like Stripe, Paddle and Modern Treasury have opened the door to making it easier for digital businesses – not necessarily in their core payments and invoicing businesses – to use APIs to incorporate more modern payments, invoicing, reconciliation and other revenue-related services into their financial stack . The opportunity that Sequence targets is related to all of these, but targets a more specific gap in the market.

As Grover described it to me, it’s one thing to make it easier for a company to incorporate a payment stream into a product. What Sequence aims to do, however, is make it just as easy to build pricing and payment services that are more personalized to the customer and to a specific moment, not unlike what businesses often do in e-commerce transactions.

It does this by leveraging payment and transaction data that business customers already have in their systems but haven’t been able to proactively analyze and use, using integrations with third-party apps like Salesforce, Hubspot, Xero, Netsuite and Quickbooks. (And it focuses on two primary ways that businesses pay each other for goods and services — bank payments or debits rather than card payments — for the payments themselves.) In this, Sequence and its investors see the startup as an early mover to build the building. payment software that allows businesses to capture real-time data and feed it into dynamic pricing and payment streams.

On top of this, Sequence is built as a “low code” service, bypassing the need for developers to build, test and ship changes.

“In a B2B environment, when you’re building new products and pricing plans, you want an interface that doesn’t always rely on developers,” she said. “We empower operators to empower themselves.”

The role of no-code and low-code software has often been described in terms of being more efficient, or simply cutting through red tape to help non-technical people become more hands-on with the digital products they themselves use, but it has recently taken on a more pragmatic, fiscally minded purpose: at a time when companies are reassessing their spending on new products and projects and how they allocate their talent resources, services like billing and payments are also being overhauled.

Sequence cites figures from Notion Capital that estimate that B2B companies today spend a surprising 7% to 9% of revenue building billing and payment infrastructure, and that includes not just software or SaaS investments, but engineers required to implement them.

“We have seen an acute pain point and therefore compelling opportunity around automating and managing payments and finance workflows,” Seema Amble, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said in a statement. “The Sequence team really impressed us with both a strong team and first set of customers excited about the vision.”