Sequence, a London-based startup offering a FinOps stack for B2B businesses to implement and interact with pricing, billing, payments and revenue data, has raised $19 million in funding.
Investment from Andreessen Horowitz
The investment round was led by a slew of world’s top investors, including Andreessen Horowitz (which just backed Halliday) alongside participation from Salesforce Ventures, Firstminute Capital, Crew Capital, Passion Capital, Dig Ventures, Fin Capital, and 9Yards. Other investors include the founders of unicorn companies like Plaid, Intercom, Jeeves, GoCardless, Marshmallow, Lendable, Hopin, UiPath, Monzo, Comply and more.
The financing will be used to expand Sequence’s billing, payments, and FinOps platform.
“We’ve seen an acute pain point and therefore compelling opportunity around automating and managing payments and finance workflows,” said Seema Amble, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “The Sequence team really impressed us with both a strong team and initial customer set excited by the vision.”
Riya Grover, Sequence co-founder and CEO, explains, “We’re building a modern FinOps platform to empower finance teams to feed real-time data, automate their payments, and garner powerful insights about their customers and business.” She continues, “Right now, finance teams conduct their entire jobs in disparate systems while collaborating over email or Slack. Invoicing and payments data is locked in a spreadsheet and never given the opportunity to be used strategically to upsell, conduct pricing experiments, assist in churn reduction, or influence feature development. ”
“Building Sequence with Riya was a no-brainer—she is one of the most exceptional European founders I’ve ever met,” says Eamon Jubbawy, Sequence’s co-founder and chairperson. “The backing from a16z and the rest of our investors is a testament to the problem we’re tackling and the world-class team we’ve brought together to solve it.”
Brainchild of repeat founders
Sequence was founded in 2021 by Riya Grover (co-founder, Feedr) and Eamon Jubbawy (co-founder, Onfido) in London. As successful repeat founders, Grover and Jubbawy have both seen the lack of delightful payment experiences for B2B companies, leaving them with few options to manage billing and payment collections. Both founders invested extensive engineering resources to build their billing engines from scratch.
With the rise of more complex and personalised pricing models, such as flexible, hybrid or usage-based, the billing challenge is amplified because of the need to synchronise data in real time across multiple systems in order to automate and scale invoicing. The need to pull and utilise real-time data presents an opportunity to entirely re-invent the core operating system that finance teams use. Sequence tackles the challenge with its low-code billing infrastructure is the bedrock of the financial operating system of the future. It empowers finance and commercial teams to work cross-functionally with product, sales, and operations to design, build, and iterate on payments infrastructure to implement any nuanced pricing model, regardless of complexity.
