Sending money to a friend is easy. Owe someone for last night’s dinner? Just open up Venmo, Zelle or Cash App and send them what you owe.
Payments between businesses aren’t nearly as easy. It involves a whole process of sending invoices, getting approval from finance teams, accounting, paperwork and so on. These manual processes also don’t scale well when businesses start working with more vendors or increase the number of services they’re paying for.
Routable was founded in 2017 to make B2B payments more like sending money to friends. The company has created software that can handle 15 different functions of the accounts payable and accounts receivable process — steps like updating accounting systems and processing compliance in bulk. As a result, Routable says that it can automate 95 percent of the manual processes in B2B payments.
Routable has gained a foothold among fast-growing midsize companies, but now it’s raising new funding to go after more enterprise customers.
On Thursday, Routable announced that it raised $30 million in its Series B funding round. This round was led by Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI and former president of Y Combinator, and his brother Jack Altman, the CEO of Lattice.
This funding is significant because Routable has history with Altman’s Y Combinator. Routable was founded in Seattle and was previously part of the University of Washington’s fintech incubator — back when it was branded as Warren. Afterwards, the company joined Y Combinator and moved its headquarters from Seattle to San Francisco. Now, Routable has a presence in both SF and Seattle, with employees in both cities.
Several other high-profile angel investors also participated in the round, including Instacart co-founder Max Mullen and Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff.
This new funding comes less than a year after Routable launched from stealth and revealed its $12 million Series A in August of 2020. Since then, the company has grown its revenue by 380 percent.
This funding will help Routable continue that growth, and in order to do so it’ll be scaling its team. The company currently has 10 open job listings across product, engineering, marketing and more. These jobs are open to Seattle, San Francisco and remote-based employees.
“The explosion of the gig economy over the past several years and the more recent boom in the creator economy are leading to a massive rise in the volume of both payments and payees creating a real business payment headache,” investor Sam Altman said in a statement. “Routable has built an incredible product and team to tackle these pain points and has quickly become the backbone of some of the fastest-growing businesses.”
Routable co-founder and CEO Omri Mor added: “We’ve intentionally partnered with a new roster of investors from companies like Box, OpenAI, Instacart, Salesforce, DoorDash and more, with deep enterprise and high-growth experience. With their guidance, we will scale our team to build the best solution for high volume enterprise business payments.”
