Dive Brief:

• Balance, a B2B e-commerce payments provider, has raised $56 million in another round of funding, the company said in a press release on Tuesday. Forerunner led the funding round, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, HubSpot Ventures, Gramercy Ventures and others, the July 26 release said.
• The company said it plans to use the added capital to introduce more of its services to international e-commerce platforms and assist business-to-business sellers in growing their online sales.
• Since its February 2021 launch, the company has raised a total of $87 million. It has also collected “hundreds” of B2B merchants and marketplaces as customers across various industries, including lumber, chemicals, steel, retail and food, per the press release. 

Dive Insight:

Balance is raising venture capital as business-to-business e-commerce transactions climb. A Forrester research firm report predicted that B2B e-commerce sales will rise to $1.8 trillion by 2023 and account for 17% of all B2B sales, up from $1.1 trillion at the end of 2018 at 12% of sales. Meanwhile, a report from investment bank Goldman Sachs forecasts all B2B payments to rise to $200 trillion by 2028, up from what was estimated to be about $127 trillion when the report was published in 2018. 

So far, those predictions appear to be on track. Nacha, previously known as National Automated Clearing House Association, said earlier this year that B2B payment volumes increased in 2021 by 20.4% over 2020 to 5.3 billion transactions, and the value of transactions rose 19% to $49.8 trillion. 

In its announcement, Balance predicted that by 2025 some 30% of all economic activity worldwide will be via e-commerce, up from 5% this year. With support from the latest funding round, the company is trying to position itself to be part of digitizing B2B payments for that new scenario.

Balance’s current clients include New York-based freelance platform Fiverr; Singapore-based clothing manufacturing support site Zilingo and Toronto-based restaurant supply chain management company Choco, said a spokesperson for the company.

“From my time at PayPal, I realized no one was tapping into the opportunity to unlock the potential of B2B eCommerce and marketplaces payments,” said Bar Geron, CEO and co-founder of Balance, in the release. “We’ve entered the fourth ‘Industrial Revolution’ that will take global trade online, creating a truly efficient market. Balance is bringing centuries-old systems into the modern-age through the power of digitization.”

Geron co-founded the company in 2020 along with Yoni Shuster, who also formerly worked for San Jose, California-based payments pioneer PayPal.

But as Balance aims to corner the B2B payments market, its competitors are also raising funds to expand their reach. In April, NovoPayment raised $19 million, which it planned to use to hire more employees and open more office locations. In July, Mesh Payments announced plans to pursue $50 million in debt financing to support its financial operations and provide customers with better payment terms.