Here’s the 21-page pitch deck that Slope, a fintech looking to upend B2B payments, used to score $30 million from investors like OpenAI’s Sam Altman

• Slope is a startup tackling the $125 trillion world of business-to-business payments.
• It offers businesses short-term financing options and software for check-out and cash management.
• Slope used this deck to raise $30 million from Sam Altman, Union Square Ventures, and Y Combinator.

Lawrence Lin Murata understands how analog running a wholesale business can be.

For the past 30 years, his parents have run a business selling toys from Chinese factories to companies in Brazil. Lin Murata grew up working at the company, doing everything from sales to filing paperwork to cashiering.

“My parents, they’re very old school, and all the existing solutions were excruciating to use, and we realized there was a real need for a frictionless B2B payments solution,” said Lin Murata, the company’s CEO.

Lin Murata and his cofounder Alice Deng are now working on Slope, a startup that aims to digitize the largely offline, $125 trillion world of business-to-business payments.

It’s a tall order to digitize B2B payments — companies ranging from middle-market to mom-and-pop shops have historically been difficult to penetrate and drive technological change.

However, being bold is part of Slope’s strategy, with Deng stating that a large part of Slope’s next phase will be “to be aggressive” in comparison to other startups and incumbents that are “just trying to stay in a survival mode.” And investors appear to be interested.

“Slope’s quest to reshape the B2B payments experience and bring the sector into the digital age is audacious — and that’s why I chose to back them,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a press release.

Union Square Ventures, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Y Combinator recently invested $30 million in the fintech. The CEOs of Deel and Zip, as well as Brex’s COO, took part in the so-called “venture round,” as the cofounders put it, which follows Slope’s Series A in April 2022.

The two-year-old company offers software for businesses that sell wholesale goods to other businesses, from processing customer orders to collecting payment and managing cash flow. Slope also employs AI to underwrite buyers and extend short-term financing through Slope’s debt capital, allowing sellers to be paid immediately.

Only a small portion of the $125 trillion global B2B payments market — less than $6 trillion, according to Slope’s pitch deck — occurs online. According to Lin Murata, the majority of the process from when a customer order is placed to when the business is paid is done manually.

Slope’s total funding now stands at $187 million, comprised of $62 million in equity and $125 million in debt. The startup’s cofounders refused to reveal its valuation. According to Deng, the funds will be used to develop new products for larger enterprise customers and to expand Slope’s 19-person team, which will focus on customer success and sales.