B2B Investment Tracker, April 24-May 1

The start of Q2 for B2B startups saw a wildly impressive launch of more than $600 million into their operations from financial backers. The past few days, however, were a bust. Businesses remained mum on their investment funding, so there’s no telling (yet) just how much the B2B sector earned in the last week. But what little backing did occur boosted a broad range of companies across international lines.

Two B2B startups squeezed in some funding just before last weekend, beginning with the $84 million raised by Chinese alternative lending platform Jimubox on Friday (April 24). The Series C backing was led by U.K.-based Investec Bank, which sees Jimubox as China’s next P2P finance leader and signals a new boost of confidence for China’s alt lending market that has so far been focused on Alibaba’s work in the space.

But as the week marched on, it became clear that venture capitalists would remain largely quiet – indeed, even secretive – with their investments in the B2B space.

Another startup, Software-as-a-Service firm Sumoware, also secured financial backing on Friday, headed by Vendep Startup. The Finnish company offers a B2B product customization service through cloud-based apps, a business strategy that Sumoware founder Lauri Koutaniemi said first began in the B2C world. We started by offering cloud-based creative apps for consumer market, but soon realized that there are thousands of companies that wanted to have their existing products customized with online tools and apps,” he told reporters. Neither Sumoware or Vendep Startup revealed how much money was invested, however.

The B2B startup sector saw some action again on Wednesday (April 29) when Software-as-a-Service startup Cintell obtained $800,000 in seed funding to expand the company’s consumer intelligence solutions. Reports said news of the funding, led by venture capitalist Venkat Janapareddy, was revealed just after Cintell announced plans to introduce its CRM offerings into the cloud this year as the software continues its closed-door, beta phase testing.

Cross-border payments service provider Align Commerce also secured funding on Wednesday, though the details are scarce. CoinDesk spoke with cross-border payments service provider Align Commerce CEO Marwan Forzley, who confirmed a recent funding round by slew of venture capitalists including Bitcoin Opportunity Corp, Boost VC and Pantera Capital took part in the fund raising, as well as several other backers.

While Forzley remained mum on just how much the company raised, he did tell reporters that the diverse range of financial backers signals growing support for blockchain innovations like cryptocurrencies and their contribution to more efficient cross-border payments, an area in which many B2B companies have struggled to overcome friction. “When you think of the seed funding, it’s an illustration of a very interesting use case, which is payment processing on the blockchain,” Forzley told CoinDesk, adding that because of “internal purposes,” the company could not disclose the amount of capital it secured.

All-in-all, this past week was essentially a dud for B2B venture capital fundraising, especially compared to the performances seen earlier this month. But that’s not to say investors are shying away from the industry. Last Monday (April 27), for example, Prague-based venture capitalist Credo Ventures announced its second funding round amounting to more than $38 million in funds. Credo’s partner and co-founder Ondrej Bartos recently told reporters that the company “will look at anything in tech, however we will slightly incline towards B2B.” The VC plans to announce its two planned investments before this summer. Until then, there’s always next week.