AMSTERDAM, Netherlands, January 16, 2023 -- Sprinque, Europe's most flexible B2B payments platform, has raised a €6m seed funding round led by Connect Ventures, with participation from Kraken Ventures, Inference Partners, and Seed X. Existing investors Antler, Volta Ventures, and Force Over Mass also contributed to the round. Sprinque's B2B payments platform enables merchants and marketplaces to offer Pay by Invoice with net payment terms to buyers online, without taking on additional risk or increasing operational overhead. Sprinque is a white labeled solution that can be fully embedded via their APIs, their Magento, Prestashop and WooCommerce plugins, or operated offline via their Merchant Control Center.
Businesses are moving to transacting online at a rapid rate. B2B eCommerce is already 5X the size of B2C e-commerce, but merchants and marketplaces still face great challenges. A key challenge to enabling online B2B transactions is that buyers expect to receive an invoice for their purchases and buyers are accustomed to receiving net payment terms of 15, 30, or 60 days, or longer, for their invoice. However, in online transactions, suppliers do not meet buyers face to face, resulting in them being generally reluctant to start production, ship their products or provide their services, without knowing upfront that they will get paid.
“We’ve identified this problem across every B2B industry. Buyers won’t convert and be retained if the ability to Pay by Invoice is not given to them, but the existing offline and manual processes B2B merchants rely on are not adequate to manage risk and serve hundreds of online buyers across multiple geographies. Sprinque has been built to enable merchants and marketplaces to offer Pay by Invoice with payment terms in the most seamless way possible for the most ambitious merchants.” - Juan Espinosa, Co-Founder and CEO.
Sprinque presents a simpler and more efficient solution that helps B2B merchants improve both conversion and retention. The Sprinque platform mitigates risk by taking on all defaults and fraud risk, as well as automating the end-to-end process of offering Pay by Invoice with net payment terms at scale.
On the buyer-end, Sprinque performs a real time fraud and credit risk assessment (with a +95% approval rate) when buyers create an account with the merchant, or when they select "Pay by Invoice" at checkout. When approved, Sprinque issues a revolving credit line buyers can use for multiple purchases. Sprinque then pays the merchant when the final invoice is issued, taking away the risk of default.
“Sprinque’s founding team has a deep understanding of B2B commerce and how to help their customers improve conversion, retention and cash flow. They recognise that a B2C-style BNPL payment method doesn't translate into a B2B context, so instead they are building a differentiated product designed specifically for the breadth and complexity of B2B commerce." - Rory Stirling, General Partner at Connect Ventures.
Sprinque’s buyer coverage includes the majority of Europe to enable frictionless cross border ecommerce. It is initially targeting merchants in the Netherlands, Spain and Germany, but is looking to expand to other countries quickly. Additionally, Sprinque was designed to support all different purchasing flow types, from a standard B2C-like checkout purchase, to more complex business purchasing flows such as gated purchasing and quote-to-cash. This investment will be used to expand deeper into European markets and build functionality outside the Pay by Invoice product, as well as developing risk sharing solutions and managing all payment flows for B2B merchants and marketplaces.
”In an increasingly online environment, the move to digital payments and financial operations in B2B trade is inevitable. In our quest to find the next big winner in B2B payments, Sprinque’s management continued to impress us with their complementarity skills and executional strength. We couldn’t be more excited to double down on our investment and help the company unlock this multi-trillion opportunity.” - Thibault D’hondt, Principal, Force Over Mass
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