B2B Payments Startup Streamlined Raises $4M

Streamlined, a new startup working on creating a better payments infrastructure, has raised $3 million in a seed financing round, TechCrunch reported Wednesday (April 27).

Boris de Souza, one of Streamlined’s founders and its CEO, used to be an founding engineer with digital bank Chime. In the report, he said there was a disparity in the way payments were handled.

“It was my first week on the job, and I received an email from a client saying ‘I think you shorted us $90 million,’” he said, speaking of his time as head of treasury for Braintree. “I looked into it, and they were right. I figured out there was a bug in the system, fixed it and wired the money. But it was incredible to me that it took them 2 ½ weeks to know they were missing $90 million.”

Streamlined’s recent round was co-led by Greycroft and SignalFire, the report said, with companies like Unusual Ventures also putting money into the startup. Additionally, the startup raised $1 million in a 2020 pre-seed round that was also led by SignalFire.

Streamlined is different from other business-to-business (B2B) payments tech, which is built on business-to-consumer (B2C) tech like Stripe that was made to deal with consumer card transactions, de Souza said. Streamlined, by contrast, has a “custom built” transaction infrastructure that builds from the ground up.

The report noted that a lot of businesses still use paper checks and ACH for things like record keeping and compliance, though payment cycles have remained messy and rife with irregularities.

Because of that, de Souza said a company’s accounting department could waste time on manual searches for payments and then on other things like reconciling invoices. The mission of Streamlined is reportedly to make sure businesses can accept payments in whatever mode they need to.

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