The B2B payments industry is expected to be worth $200 trillion by 2028. Yet, many small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) rely on manual payment processing and use a variety of tools to monitor their transactions, resulting in delayed invoicing and lower income.
Berlin-based Monite tackles these issues by offering businesses with customised automation by integrating with platforms that SMBs currently use on a regular basis.
Monite, founded in 2020 by Andrey Korchak and Ivan Maryasin, enables high-end finance automation tools to be integrated into B2B platforms, marketplaces, neobanks, and vertical SaaS enterprises.
Backed by Klarna and Mollie founder
The API-first embedded finance workflows startup recently closed $5M in Seed funding in a round led by Third Prime, which was joined by S16, Audeo Ventures, and Long Run Capital. This investment follows a $5M seed led by Point72 Ventures in early 2022 and brings Monite’s total Seed funding to $10M. This brings the total funding to $11.3M. The previous investment round was also backed by fintech giant Klarna founder Victor Jacobsson, Mollie founder Adriaan Mol, PayPal senior executive Phil Valka, Plaid executive Jason Pate, fintech investor and Money2020 founder Jonathan Weiner, and Ex-Deutsche Bank Board Member and Oxygen investor Ralph Müller.
How does it work?
Monite’s financial solutions are embedded by SaaS providers, marketplaces, and neobanks to provide their business customers with the full array of invoicing and billing services. This cuts firms’ processing expenses per invoice by 80%, allowing platforms to boost revenue per customer by 2-5x without spending 1-2 years constructing a costly (often $ 3-4 million in initial costs) payment infrastructure internally.
The fresh funds will be used to build new product features, cover more payment and financial services integrations, and broaden the company’s reach in the expanding B2B payments sector.
Ivan Maryasin, co-founder and CEO of Monite, said, “We are happy to be backed by thought leaders of the embedded finance space with huge expertise and hands-on experience in FinTech, who clearly understand the needs of the current market. Only 5-10% of SMBs use a modern finance stack, while 79% of them still do their accounts payable manually. SMBs remain technically underserved, while B2B neobanks, eCommerce and B2B SaaS businesses have an incredible opportunity here to grow their revenue with no additional marketing expenses. Digitalizing finance workflows through existing SaaS players is a game-changer, and we allow our clients to become an all-in-one financial OS for their industry.”
Mike Kim, Partner at Third Prime, added, “From a demand perspective, there’s a real gap for Monite to fill. Monite’s innovative approach to B2B payments automation through better contextual distribution has the potential to revolutionize a market that has been historically resistant to innovation by streamlining payment processes and eliminating the headaches of manual processing. By providing a tailored and efficient solution through its API-first finance workflows, Monite has the power to unlock an enormous opportunity for the B2B sector, both for SMBs and the platforms serving them, in a repeatable and durable way.”
The foundation of Monite
The company has two founders including Ivan Maryasin and Andrey Korchak. Ivan Maryasin is the CEO in the German startup, where he manages product strategy, business growth, and investor relations. Before Monite, he led growth for Penta, which is a leading German SMB neobank that was sold to Qonto in 2022. Previously, he led growth for startups in Silicon Valley and Europe, including BrightEdge and People.ai, a Y-Combinator alumnus that a16z invested in. Throughout his career, he has consistently focused on neobanking and B2B and using technology to improve business performance.
On the other hand, with over 15 years of experience in software engineering, Andrey Korchak is the CTO of Monite. Before Monite, he was a Technical Lead in one of the largest Eastern European digital banks Tochka. Andrey previously founded Vokabee, a Singapore-based EdTech company funded by Telstra, Australia’s largest telco, and based on his research in computer linguistics. Previously he was with Wakie, a Y-Combinator company, where he played a leading role in increasing user retention on the mobile app.
In terms of competition, the company said that the main alternatives to Monite are building functionalities in-house or using a standalone white label solution that is not integrated with the main application. Monite claims to be the first one to offer AP/AR functionalities in the API-first manner, with payments and financial services integrated into the workflow.
The company has a team of more than 40 professionals worldwide as it scales in terms of products and features.
