Upflow, a French startup we’ve been masking for fairly some time, initially centered on managing excellent invoices. The corporate is now saying a shift in its technique to turn into a B2B cost platform with its personal cost gateway to enhance its accounts receivable automation answer.
Like many software-as-a-service merchandise, Upflow began by constructing a central hub particularly designed for one job particularly: CFOs. From the Upflow dashboards, CFOs and finance groups may see all their firm’s invoices, observe funds, talk with crew members, and ship reminders to purchasers.
It integrates properly with different monetary instruments and companies to robotically import information from these third-party companies. And a instrument like Upflow may be notably necessary as many tech corporations battle to boost their subsequent funding spherical and need to enhance their money stability.
However that was simply step one in an even bigger roadmap.
“Principally, my imaginative and prescient has at all times been that the actual downside is cost strategies,” Upflow co-founder and CEO Alexandre Louisy (pictured above) instructed TechCrunch. “At present, while you pay in a retailer, you pay along with your cellphone. Once you pay to your Spotify subscription or your Amazon subscription, you don’t even take into consideration the way you pay.”
“However while you have a look at B2B funds, the best way you pay at present hasn’t modified within the final 50 years. And for us, that’s why folks battle with late funds. The factor I’m actually making an attempt to struggle in opposition to is the concept late funds are linked to dangerous payers.“
In line with him, round 90% of B2B funds nonetheless occur offline within the U.S. It’s nonetheless largely paper checks. In Europe, it’s a unique story as corporations have adopted financial institution transfers. However transfers “are utterly unstructured and require guide reconciliation,” Louisy stated.
Upflow sells its accounts receivable automation software program instrument to midsized corporations with a income between $10 million and $500 million per 12 months. The corporate’s largest consumer generates round $1 billion in annual income.
“However while you ask [CFOs], ‘What’s your technique for establishing direct debit on a part of your buyer base?’ They don’t have an answer,” Louisy stated.
Upflow helps you arrange incentive methods so {that a} portion of your consumer base strikes to on-line funds, reminiscent of card funds or direct debits. The concept isn’t that each one your purchasers are going to pay with a enterprise card in a single day. However Upflow can assist you alter the cost methodology for one thing like 20% or 30% of your consumer base.
Similar to CRMs show you how to handle your gross sales processes with purchasers, Upflow now desires to be a monetary relationship administration (FRM) answer. It’s an attention-grabbing technique because it exhibits how a startup like Upflow is considering diversifying its income sources.
“With our mannequin shift, we’re transferring from a mannequin the place we’re 100% based mostly on SaaS income to a hybrid mannequin the place we’ve got SaaS income and cost income as a result of we’ve got our personal cost gateway that we’ve arrange with Stripe,” Louisy stated.
Fee is the second brick in Upflow’s product suite. Up subsequent, the corporate plans to combine financing choices with B2B “purchase now, pay later” cost strategies on the provider entrance and factoring for a corporation’s excellent invoices.
“We consider options … that present embedded finance,” Louisy stated. ”It’s not our core enterprise to carry out danger evaluation. Alternatively, what’s attention-grabbing is that we will convey them helpful information for credit score scoring that they don’t essentially have once they simply hook up with one in all our customers’ accounts.”
