It's not everyday that OpenAI founder Sam Altman teaches a class at Stanford University, but Lawrence Lynn Murata, co-founder and CEO of Slope, displayed just that entrepreneurial spirit when founding the B2B payments company with Alice Deng.
“We met in 2016 when he was teaching a class called 'How to Start a Startup,'” Lynn Murata told TechCrunch. “He was doing some talks and we started to keep in touch.”
After Lynn Murata and Deng launched Slope in 2021, that relationship blossomed and eventually turned into a vote of confidence from the famous startup investor: After raising a seed round in 2021 and a Series A in 2022, Altman was among the investors backing the company in a $30 million venture round in 2023.
“He was really impressed with the progress we've made on the slopes,” Lynn Murata said.
Here's what impressed Altman: Slope is a Silicon Valley-based B2B payments platform that provides order-to-cash workflow automation for large enterprises. Large enterprise customers use Slope to manage transactions and optimize their payment processes. They also use it to accept online payments and offer financing options to their buyers.
The Technology Behind Slope
Both Lin Murata and Deng have backgrounds in artificial intelligence, so large-scale language model AI powers the company’s underwriting infrastructure, including B2B checkout, customer and vendor risk assessment, payment reconciliation and cash management.
According to Lynn Murata, the Slope team built its own LLM and trained the model with proprietary transactional, financial and payment activity data from across the banking system to classify and enrich bank data. They take raw bank data and recreate financial metrics that are then fed into Slope's AI model for underwriting. The company also leverages alternative data sources, including public information, social media information and any information from merchants.
Prior to joining Slope, Lynn Murata founded Newton Technologies in the autonomous vehicle industry, and after that company was acquired by Naut, she brought some of the early data science and engineering talent from Newton to Slope. Since then, Slope has invested in machine learning and data infrastructure to also monitor customers and buyers in real time and create actionable risk profiles.
AI for self-driving cars and LLM AI for financial trading are very different fields, but Lynn Murata says they have one big thing in common: the need for speed.
“Autonomous driving is a very cutthroat industry where how fast you can iterate on your models is key,” he said. “At Slope, speed of iteration is a big barrier. We have an active learning system that allows us to continually retrain and improve our models as we get new data. The macro economy is changing, so we want to be able to sense everything in real time, and of course correct, just like a self-driving car.”
Enter JP Morgan and the Altmans
Beyond his investments, Sam Altman's influence extended across the company, with Lynn Murata citing a 2016 tweet from Altman about hiring as inspiration for the company's name: “Hire on the slope, not the y-intercept. This is actually the best advice I've ever received in my life.”
The tweet was essentially a call to action to hire people with the skills they'll need for the fast-growing jobs of the future (the “slope” is how steep the line is on the graph) rather than the skills they need for jobs today (the y-intercept is where the line crosses the y-axis on the graph).
“That's why we're called Slope,” Lynn Murata said. “We believe in iteration. As you can see in Sam's career and my career as an outsider to fintech, we're big believers in high slope. If you have two curves and one has a high Y-intercept, the other curve starts out lower. As long as there's a slope, it's going to eventually outpace the other curve.”
Deng did not elaborate on how much customer and revenue traction the company currently has, but said it currently works with several Fortune 500 companies and plans to announce more partnerships with them in the coming months.
In addition to Sam Altman as an investor, his brothers Jack Altman and Max Altman are also new investors. Lynn Murata and Den met Max Altman in 2022 and connected with Jack Altman last year.
All three Altman brothers are founders and tactical thinkers, but each brings something different to the table: Jack is best known as the founder and former CEO of HR software startup Lattice, bringing talent management expertise as well as investment experience with his own firm, Alt Capital.
Max Altman, co-founder and managing partner of the new fund, Saga Ventures, invested in Slope during his time at Apollo Project. Altman introduced Slope's founders to potential executives and investors at the company, as well as advising them on how to scale the sales team, while Sam is available to help with “strategic planning, go-to-market strategy and board management,” Lynn Murata said.
Slope also secured a $65 million strategic equity and debt funding round led by JPMorgan Payments, with participation from Y Combinator, Jack Altman and Saga Ventures. This new funding brings the company's total funding to $252 million, comprised of $77 million in equity and $175 million in debt.
As Slope continues to maintain a very small team of just 24 employees beyond 2021, the new funding will be used to expand the team and operations to serve more large enterprises, Deng said.
Enterprise Focus
With the B2B payments market expected to grow to $174 trillion by the end of the decade, Slope is not the only startup looking to revolutionize the sector, with other startups including Paystand, a B2B payments provider in the decentralized finance space, and global SME companies Monite, Two, Xepelin and Nala.
But that's where the trust from JPMorgan comes in: The bank's payments division is not just an investor, it also represents a potential profit for clients of JPMorgan Payments, which helps clients pay customers and employees in a variety of currencies around the world and processes about $10 trillion in payments every day.
JP Morgan Payments said it selected Slope to provide its clients with access to Slope's short-term lending solutions, joining the JP Morgan Payments Partner Network, an ecosystem of third-party applications that can help businesses grow faster.
As the embedded finance market expands in the U.S., more companies will seek solutions that “reduced friction, streamlined processes and supported loan origination,” James Fraser, global head of trade and working capital at JPMorgan Payments, said in a statement.
Slope's strengths are “underwriting and credit oversight, and the flexibility of the platform,” Fraser said. As part of the investment, Fraser will join Slope's board of directors as an observer.
When asked if this strategic alliance could lead to an acquisition down the line, both founders shook their heads emphatically and said “no.”
“Our goal is the same and it's very clear: We want to build a category-defining company,” Lynn Murata said.