Dive Brief:

• Israeli tech startup Monto, which is focused on easing companies’ shift to digital business-to-business payments, has raised $9 million in seed funding, the company said Tuesday.
• The startup, which also announced the opening of a U.S. office in New York, provides an artificial intelligence-enabled platform designed to resolve pain points experienced by vendors as they manage more and more digital payments from customers and are forced in many cases to work with various types of accounts payable portals, according to a press release.
• “In this new B2B world, suppliers must integrate with each customer's payment software, each with its own complex logins and workflows, creating endless chaos for payment collection teams that can severely impact cash flow and working capital,” the release said.

Dive Insight:

The total value of global B2B payments will grow 40% by 2028, from $89 trillion in 2024, driven in large part by increased digital payments adoption, which is expected to enable cheaper and more secure cross-border trade, Juniper Research reported in February.

Digital payments are becoming more the norm, while traditional payment methods such as checks are becoming less common, according to a 2022 report by the Association for Financial Professionals.

“With the increasing shift towards digital payments, organizations are facing some headwinds,” the report said. “Those barriers are varied but included among them are customer and supplier acceptance of digital transactions, scarcity of IT resources and a lack of integration between systems.”

The trend is forcing many vendors to work with dozens, and in some cases hundreds, of different payment portals, each one with a different set of requirements, according to Maya Cohen, Monto’s CEO and co-founder.

“This can be frustrating, because you have multiple payment portals that you have to manage in order to collect revenues,” Cohen said in an interview.

Monto’s platform allows vendors to “seamlessly” get paid through any customer AP portal, according to the Tuesday release. In addition, AI capabilities incorporated into the platform enable it to learn each customer’s invoicing requirements “to ensure a seamless payment flow for the supplier to significantly reduce manual workload, mitigate the risk of late payments and improve cash flow management,” the release said.

The startup, which was founded in 2021, has already helped suppliers get paid close to $1 billion through thousands of “smart” connections to different buyers in more than 300 portals, according to the announcement.

The company said it will use its funding to support its U.S. expansion and beef up its technology. The founding round was led by Foster City, California-based venture capital firm Scale Venture Partners.