getpaid, an end-to-end payments solution for marketplaces and platforms, announced a €5.7 million seed investment led by Nordic early-stage VC Inventure. Existing investor Picus Capital increased its stake, as well as leading European angels Christian Grobe and Matthias Knecht, founders of B2B BNPL platform Billie; Ilkka Paananen, co-founder of Supercell; Kai-Uwe Mokros, MD of Zalando Payments; Jordane Giuly, founder of Defacto / Spendesk; and Felix Jahn, serial entrepreneur and high profile angel investor
B2B SaaS platforms and marketplaces are currently among today’s most rapidly growing sectors, and take a significant share of the B2B payments market, which is still 80% offline despite being 5x larger than the B2C payments. Yet, while B2C e-commerce companies can easily plug into a fintech solution to handle everything related to payments, B2B platforms and marketplaces still have no way to offload that complexity.
“We give SaaS enabled B2B marketplaces the tools and make it as easy as possible to customize money flows according to their business needs,” said Cyrosch Kalateh, getpaid CEO and cofounder.
The key inhibitor for marketplaces and platforms to scale rapidly is their multiparty setup between buyers, sellers and platforms that represent high complexity from an end-to-end payment operations angle. Additionally, the B2B payments world lags behind in merchant experience and adoption, ease of integration, and digital payment method offering.
“If a platform wants to offer invoice payments with net terms, cards, direct debits, split the payments across three different parties in different countries with different payout rules – and wants to make payment revenue by customer tiers. It should basically be just a few clicks. That can only be done with platform-tailored payments capabilities, innovative ways to use platforms’ aggregated data and utilization of artificial intelligence. But not again with adding more people to your payment operations team to just reconcile and chase workarounds,” commented Gonzalo Ruiz, co-founder and CTO of getpaid.
getpaid takes charge of payment splits, fees, and commissions involving multiple parties and geographies, while easily enabling payout timings with integrated payment and finance operations. This allows platforms to scale their revenue and merchant base, and offer new service lines without increasing team size or internal complexity.
Gwen Sandberg, Investor at Inventure, added: “We believe that the next frontier for payments is payment providers who truly innovate and solve an innate pain point within a specific market vertical that the now ubiquitous horizontal payment provider can’t solve for. Marketplaces and verticals SaaS are a rapidly growing vertical whose traits make it perfect for a verticalized payment solution. The player who will win this vertical is the one who abstracts away complexities within multi-party payments, who shoulders the regulatory requirements and who gives back control to the platform provider, enabling them to focus on doing what they do well – whether it is operating a marketplace or running a vertical SaaS.”
Founded in 2022, getpaid has already onboarded multiple live customers and closed additional contract representing more than €600 million of GMV across different B2B marketplaces and platforms. They have offices in Düsseldorf and Madrid and comprise of team of veterans from Microsoft, Google, AMex, Tink and Payvision.
Florian Reichert, Partner and Managing Director at Picus, said, “We have been observing the complexities platform and marketplace teams face as well as the potential embedded payments offer to them. Hence, we developed a strong hypothesis around new infrastructure solutions that enable a strategic positioning of payments in their business model and e2e solutions to streamline their operations. Getpaid has been able to combine both in a smart manner which makes us very excited to further double down and continue working closely with Cyrosch, Gonzalo and the rest of the team.”
