San Francisco-based AI startup Slope is aiming to address the challenges faced by B2B companies in tracking and ensuring the integrity of payments. The company is developing a B2B payments tracking and receiving platform that utilizes its own “rules-based” technology and OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo. Slope also plans to create its own proprietary large language models (LLMs). Recently, the company announced a $30 million equity round led by Union Square Ventures, bringing its total funding to $187 million. Slope’s CEO and co-founder, Lawrence Lin Murata, draws from personal experience in the wholesale goods industry to address the payment issues faced by B2B vendors.
Slope’s platform offers an online payments and invoicing tool that enables B2B customers to accept various payment methods, including credit card, ACH, and international payments. The company handles customer onboarding, risk assessment, reconciling, and all tasks in between. Additionally, Slope provides financing options for customers who cannot make upfront payments. The platform offers improved visibility into B2B payment workflows through features like Slope Timeline, keeping vendors and customers informed about payment and product shipping statuses in near real-time. Slope emphasizes the importance of “clean data” in its approach to de-risking payments and offers AI-powered tools like SlopeGPT to assess a buyer’s creditworthiness and fraud risk.
To obtain clean data, Slope collaborates with enterprise customers to gather data about their orders, which is then formatted and surfaced within the platform. Slope’s AI tool, SlopeGPT, runs customer transaction and purchase order data through OpenAI’s GPT to determine regular and anomalous payments. The platform also uses rules-based data management techniques to provide relevant data and suggestions. By analyzing a buyer’s risk, SlopeGPT can identify potential anomalies or fraudulent activities. The company is also developing its own proprietary LLM, trained on public data, to enhance risk identification.
