Veem Ends Funding Round With $31M

Global payments network Veem has closed a funding round with $31 million in new capital, a press release says.

Truist Ventures, the corporate venture capital division of Truist Financial Corporation, the country’s sixth largest commercial bank, led the round.

The investment will go towards developing a “robust” channel partner program which the press release says will strengthen the company’s global footprint, along with improvements to the company’s product suite and capabilities.

The release touts the improvements the Veem technology will make on the international transfer process, using the better parts of the old system with new digital wallet and blockchain technology to boost the procedures, integrating with programs like Quickbooks, Xero and NetSuite.

“This funding round marks an important milestone for the company, putting us in an ideal position to build out our channel partner program and prepare for Veem’s next stage of global growth,” said Marwan Forzley, CEO of Veem, according to the press release. “Our channel partner network serves as our vehicle to better commercialize our product offering and further expand upon our market development efforts.”

Vanessa Vreeland, head of Truist Ventures, said Veem was “solving a critical pain point” for smaller firms.

“Their proprietary multi-rail technology enables connections between businesses and their vendors, suppliers and contractors through a service that is easy to use and more cost-effective than legacy cross-border B2B payment options —capabilities that our clients need,” she said, according to the release.

Last year, Veem was working to combat the cash flow difficulties companies were facing because of the trade war between the U.S. and China, which had resulted in a 57 percent drop in payment size from U.S.-to-China B2B payments between 2017 and 2018, along with a 50 percent drop between 2018 and 2019.

PYMNTS writes that the initiative was to pay companies $1,000 as reimbursements for the trade tariffs they were paying when dealing with China.