Personal blog of Yzmir Ramirez

Credit cards have become all but ubiquitous for consumer transactions, and it isn’t hard to see why. By intermediating payments, networks like Visa allow buyers and sellers to exchange money for goods and services without knowing the financial risk profile of the counter-party. Rather than applying for credit at every merchant you shop at, you apply once at your issuing institution, and then can transact with every merchant on the network. It’s the simple formula: reducing friction means more sales, and therefore more profits.

Yet for all the innovation in the consumer side of the economy, there has been an astonishingly limited amount of innovation in the B2B world. Payments between businesses are still conducted through invoices, with net payment terms that can exceed 90 days and with little knowledge of the financial risk of the counter-parties. There is no FICO score for business as there is with consumers, nor is there a system that can intermediate those transactions and reduce their friction.

That’s where Fundbox comes in. The SF-headquartered startup wants to ultimately transform B2B payments by creating a Visa-like payments network that allows businesses to transact with each other without having to know counter-party risk while also getting everyone paid faster.

It’s a vision that has pulled in the attention of even more venture capital. The company, which was founded in 2013, announced today that it has raised $176 million in a series C equity financing led by a consortium of funders, including Allianz X, Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan, HarbourVest and a litany of others. Existing backers Khosla, General Catalyst, and Spark Capital Growth also participated. With this new round of capital, the company’s total equity funding reaches upwards of $300 million.

In addition to the equity capital, the company also announced that it has raised a $150 million credit facility to underwrite its product.

Fundbox CEO Eyal Shinar said that a priority in this fundraise was to select backers who not only could invest in equity, but also had large balance sheets who could expand the company’s underwriting capability as it scales.

Today, Fundbox’s core product is a revolving line of credit for small businesses. Cash flow is a huge concern for many companies, since they often have to wait for a payment from an invoice to arrive before investing in their next projects or hiring more employees. A revolving line of credit allows companies to flexibly draw down and pay back a loan, while only paying fees on what a company uses.

To apply for the loan, companies connect Fundbox to their financial data store (for example, QuickBooks), and Fundbox slurps in the data and offers a credit decision in as fast as minutes. Companies can then tap their line of credit almost immediately and use it as working capital. As invoices are paid, companies can then pay off their line of credit and stop paying fees.

From that product base, Shinar ultimately sees Fundbox as a GDP-scale startup, given the value it could potentially unlock for companies and the economy at large. “There are more than $3 trillion locked in those invoices,” he explained to me, “$3.4 trillion flows through consumer credit cards, but $23 trillion are in invoices … and even if you focus on [just] small and medium business, it’s $9 trillion.”

As the company collects data from all the players in the market, it wants to build upon those data network effects to ultimately operate the payment rails for B2B transactions. So instead of offering a line of credit to the seller, it could facilitate both sides of the transaction and get rid of the root complexity in the first place.

It’s a bold vision, and certainly one that has attracted a variety of players. In the startup world, Kabbage (whose co-founder and president Kathryn Petralia I will be interviewing at TechCrunch Disrupt SF next week) has built a business around line of credit lending and has similarly raised large amounts of venture capital.

Larger companies like Square, PayPay, and Intuit (which owns the popular accounting software QuickBooks) have introduced various lending products to B2B customers. And in terms of payments, Stripe through its new credit card and Brex offer the means for companies to empower their employees to make purchases on behalf of the company.

Shinar said that a huge priority for Fundbox has been to make underwriting more efficient. He said that a large percentage of the current employee base at the company is data scientists, and the company has built upon the wave of digitalization that has taken place among small and medium businesses. “Every company has at least one set of APIs … and it is accessible, and it is granular,” Shinar said. By just tapping into those existing data feeds, Fundbox is able to avoid the human underwriting common with much of business lending today.

One initiative the company has undertaken is a tool dubbed “X-Ray” to better describe how the company’s machine learning models are really underwriting its loan products. Shinar noted that payments is a highly-regulated space, and that the company has to be able to explain its decisions and how they are unbiased to any regulator that might start asking questions.

The company today has 240 employees spread across SF, Tel Aviv, and a recently launched office in Dallas. Shinar says that he wants to use the new funds to “go on the offensive” and “double and triple down on what is working.”

Square, the company that provides payments and other business services to merchants, is today taking another step in its gradual expansion outside of the U.S. Stand — one of Square’s key pieces of hardware, turning an iPad into a point of sale system — is launching in the U.K.

It will sell for £64 (+VAT) and will be sold alongside existing products that Square offers in the U.K. — Square Reader, its Point of Sale app, Instant Deposit, Virtual Terminal and Cash app. (Square Register, the company’s all-in-one product for larger businesses that sells for $999, is not yet available outside the U.S.)

The move comes just over a year after Square launched in the U.K., its first market in Europe, and also on the heels of a big move from two of its biggest competitors: last week, PayPal said it would acquire iZettle, sometimes referred to as “the Square of Europe,” for $2.2 billion.

Those two developments underscore both the challenges and opportunities ahead for Square.

On the one hand, the company is tapping into a big market opportunity by creating services that cater to the often-overlooked small and medium business sector — and the Stand, which extends a tablet into a more interactive payment terminal, plays into that.

On the other hand, the consolidation underway between iZettle and PayPal points to how stronger competitors — PayPal’s market cap is nearly four times that of Square — going after the same business as Square, will put pressure on the company. (As a point of comparison, iZettle’s tablet stands range in price from £49 to £99.)

Square may be smaller, but it has picked up a lot of loyalty for its services and innovations. Square says that today the company has two million business customers using its products globally. It doesn’t break out numbers by geography or product. But given how many merchants use more than just a phone to take payments and run other sales software (a phone being the basic building block of Square’s original card payment processor), it was a much-requested feature.

“Square Stand was built to provide sellers with a unique and beautiful solution that makes taking in-person payments simple, elegant and fast,” said Jesse Dorogusker, Square’s hardware lead and designer of the Stand. “Sellers in the U.K. have been asking for a full countertop solution for their businesses since we first introduced Square.”

Despite its popularity and how it seemed to appear and take off amid a surge of smartphone and tablet adoption and use in the U.S., Square has taken a very deliberate route when it’s come to growing outside its home country, where payment methods, regulations and languages might all be different. Today, the company has operations in the United States, Canada, Japan, Australia and the U.K. It also has an office in Ireland but not active payments or other business.

Asked about where Square might like to go next, the company has remained mum.

“Nothing to share on that front,” a spokesperson said. “We are just getting started here in the U.K. and iterating fast to bring new services to market. Since we entered the U.K. market in 2017 we have continued to bring our U.K. sellers important products at a steady pace.”

 Square posted a largely successful fourth quarter that showed continuing growth with its Cash App — with users spending around $90 million on its Cash card in December, putting it on a potentially $1 billion run rate. That would offer another significant avenue for Square to snap up additional customers as it looks to chip away at the alternatives available for directly sending cash… Read More

 Square, the payments company founded and run by Jack Dorsey, released its quarterly financial results for the first quarter after the bell on Wednesday. The company beat expectations, bringing in $462 million in revenue, when investors were forecasting $451 million. This is a 22 percent increase from the same period last year. Read More

 Mobile payment startup Square has been gradually building out the products it offers to small businesses to position itself as a one-stop shop for their various front-of-house and back-office needs. Today sees the latest development on that theme: the company has launched Square Payroll, software for businesses to pay and track taxes and other costs for both hourly and salaried employees.… Read More

 As mobile payment startup Square faces reports that it’s delaying an IPO amid growth problems and other pressures, iZettle, the Swedish mobile payments company that has been referred to as the Square of Europe, has raised another €40 million ($55.5 million). In an interview, CEO and founder Jacob de Geer said the funding will be used to continue building out its business, namely… Read More

Ezetap, a Bangalore-based mobile payment startup that uses a rectangular device to turn any mobile phone into a point-of-sales terminal when plugged in, is raising additional funding from American Express. Last month, the startup had raised $8 million in Series B funding led by Helion Advisors, Social+Capital and Berggruen Holdings. “The investment will allow us to turn on additional… Read More