Highlights:

  • Sequence, which wants to make what it terms a new kind of FinOps stack for B2B businesses will use the fund to improve its products and hire more people.
  • Sequence is also a “low code” service, so developers don’t have to build, test, and ship changes.

Talking about Fintech, consumers have commanded the most attention in the last decade, with banking, credit, investing, and other services getting disrupted for a long time. At the same time, there has been a growing trend toward building more for the B2B market on the heels of the bigger enterprise swing in tech. One of the hopefuls in this sector announced that it had secured funds for its public launch in the fourth quarter of this year.

Sequence, which wants to make what it terms a new kind of FinOps stack for B2B businesses –APIs and other data and analytics tools to make pricing, billing, and related services more responsive – announced a raise of USD 19 million in a seed round. It will use the fund to improve its products and hire more people.

London-based, Sequence has a massive list of prominent investors, even as it is yet to make a start.

Andreessen Horowitz, a Silicon Valley firm that has recently been doing more business in Europe, is leading the round. Salesforce Ventures, Firstminute Capital, Crew Capital, Passion Capital, Dig Ventures, Fin Capital, and 9Yards are also involved. The founders of Plaid, Intercom, Jeeves, GoCardless, Marshmallow, Lendable, Hopin, UiPath, Monzo, and Comply are other investors that are not being named.

There were rumors about this seed round, especially a 16z’s involvement, which was doing the rounds for a year. Not only did the big-name investor draw attention, but so did the founders’ track record. Riya Grover, the CEO, previously started a “cloud canteen” company called Feedr, which she later sold to Compass Group. The chairperson, Eamon Jubbawy, was one of the founders of an identity verification company called Onfido. In any case, the funding hadn’t closed yet at the time and ultimately landed with more investors at a greater size.

As Grover explained, it’s one thing to make it easier for a company to add a payments flow into a product: Businesses have numerous options today if that is what they need. However, what Sequence is aiming at is to make it just as easy to build pricing and payment services that are more tailored to the customer and to a specific time, not unlike what businesses mostly do in e-commerce transactions.

Sequence does this by using payments and transaction data that its business customers may already have in their systems but haven’t been able to break down and use proactively. It integrates with third-party apps like Salesforce, HubSpot, Xero, NetSuite, and QuickBooks. (It focuses on the two main ways businesses pay each other for goods and services, bank payments or debits rather than card payments.) Sequence and its investors believe the start-up is an early mover in building payments software that lets businesses collect real-time data to create dynamic pricing and payment flows.

Above all, Sequence is also a “low code” service, so developers don’t have to build, test, and ship changes by using more accessible tools such as spreadsheets and graphic interfaces.

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

No-code and low-code software has often been talked about in terms of being more efficient or cutting through red tape to help non-technical people get more hands-on with their digital products. However, it has recently taken on a more practical, money-focused role. At a time when companies are re-evaluating how much they spend on new products and projects and how they allocate talent resources, services like billing and payments can help them save money.

Sequence uses data from Notion Capital that estimate that B2B companies spend a surprising 7% to 9% of their revenue on building billing and payments infrastructure. This doesn’t just include software or SaaS investments but also the engineers who are needed to establish them.

Seema Amble, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, stated, “We’ve seen an acute pain point and, therefore, the compelling opportunity around automating and managing payments and finance workflows.” She added, “The Sequence team really impressed us with both a strong team and initial customer set excited by the vision.”