pay has acquired expense management software startup teampay To create what the companies describe as a “fee-free B2B digital payments and spend powerhouse.”
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. TeamPay has raised $65 million since its founding in 2016.
The combined company serves more than 1 million businesses running on commercial blockchains to more than 1 million participants. It has handled more than $10 billion in transactions to date, which it says represents about 2% of annual US business-to-business payments.
“TeamPay represents this new class of fintech companies,” Jeremy Almond, CEO of Paystand, exclusively told TechCrunch. “They have products for CFOs that can really change how they digitalize all of their workflows. It’s what I would call a next-generation experience for users and it’s a really good fit for our customers going through a big modernization process.
Paystand will continue to run the TeamPay brand, he said, primarily because it is well-known.
Almond believes that business fintech should learn from consumer finance apps. In the B2B world, the process of sending and receiving money is complex, slow, and laden with fees. But consumers can send and receive money to each other through Venmo or CashApp. These are the types of features he wants Paystand to offer.
TeamPay is the blockchain-enabled B2B payments provider’s second acquisition in two years. It bought a payment platform Yayadu In 2022. That time, payThe valuation was north of $1 billion. Paystand has brought in $98 million in venture capital since it was founded in 2014. TeamPay is not on the blockchain, however, now Paystand can bring that functionality to both the accounts receivable and accounts payable sides.
“We think this is a trend of consumerization of the enterprise,” Almond said. “We can now offer both sides to 1 million businesses.”
Despite fintech being a hot industry in recent years, the banking industry overall is one old payment rail problem, This leads to higher fees, more middlemen and delays. Almond is a longtime proponent of using decentralized finance infrastructure to solve the payments rail problem. Paystand uses the Ethereum blockchain as the engine for its Paystand Bank network, enabling business-to-business payments with zero fees.
“Blockchain is the new cloud,” he said. “I know there are some problems with blockchain, Bitcoin, and decentralized finance networks, but they represent a fundamental shift from the same centralized banking system that has been around since the 1930s.”
“Many people think that blockchain or decentralized finance is not ready yet,” he said. “We’re really proving that if you create real value for businesses and finance teams, people will use it.”
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