Close Menu
TechBrunchTechBrunch
  • Home
  • AI
  • Apps
  • Crypto
  • Security
  • Startups
  • TechCrunch
  • Venture

Subscribe to Updates

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss our latest news

Subscribe my Newsletter for New Posts & tips Let's stay updated!

What's Hot

Act 2 of Drive Capital – How Columbus Ventures Success After Split

July 5, 2025

Pets ready-made stem cell therapy may come

July 4, 2025

Everyone in high tech has an opinion about Soham Parekh

July 3, 2025
Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
TechBrunchTechBrunch
  • Home
  • AI

    OpenAI seeks to extend human lifespans with the help of longevity startups

    January 17, 2025

    Farewell to the $200 million woolly mammoth and TikTok

    January 17, 2025

    Nord Security founder launches Nexos.ai to help enterprises move AI projects from pilot to production

    January 17, 2025

    Data proves it remains difficult for startups to raise capital, even though VCs invested $75 billion in the fourth quarter

    January 16, 2025

    Apple suspends AI notification summaries for news after generating false alerts

    January 16, 2025
  • Apps

    Not everyone is excited about DMs on the thread

    July 3, 2025

    Meta has found another way to engage you: message that message first

    July 3, 2025

    Everything you need to know about Flash, Blueski-based Instagram alternatives

    July 3, 2025

    Substack brings new updates to live streaming as it increases video push

    July 2, 2025

    Amazon shuts down the Freevee app in August

    July 2, 2025
  • Crypto

    Vitalik Buterin reserves for Sam Altman's global project

    June 28, 2025

    Calci will close a $185 million round as rival Polymeruk reportedly seeks $200 million

    June 25, 2025

    Stablecoin Evangelist: Katie Haun's Battle of Digital Dollars

    June 22, 2025

    Hackers steal and destroy millions of Iran's biggest crypto exchanges

    June 18, 2025

    Unique, a new social media app

    June 17, 2025
  • Security

    Ransomware Gang Hunter International says it's shut down

    July 3, 2025

    India's biggest finance says hackers have accessed customer data from insurance units

    July 2, 2025

    Data breaches reveal that Catwatchful's “Stalkerware” is spying on thousands of phones

    July 2, 2025

    Hacking, Leaking, Exposure: Do not use stalkerware apps

    July 2, 2025

    Qantas Hacks lead to theft of personal data for 6 million passengers

    July 2, 2025
  • Startups

    7 days left: Founders and VCs save over $300 on all stage passes

    March 24, 2025

    AI chip startup Furiosaai reportedly rejecting $800 million acquisition offer from Meta

    March 24, 2025

    20 Hottest Open Source Startups of 2024

    March 22, 2025

    Andrill may build a weapons factory in the UK

    March 21, 2025

    Startup Weekly: Wiz bets paid off at M&A Rich Week

    March 21, 2025
  • TechCrunch

    OpenSea takes a long-term view with a focus on UX despite NFT sales remaining low

    February 8, 2024

    AI will save software companies' growth dreams

    February 8, 2024

    B2B and B2C are not about who buys, but how you sell

    February 5, 2024

    It's time for venture capital to break away from fast fashion

    February 3, 2024

    a16z's Chris Dixon believes it's time to focus on blockchain use cases rather than speculation

    February 2, 2024
  • Venture

    Act 2 of Drive Capital – How Columbus Ventures Success After Split

    July 5, 2025

    Pets ready-made stem cell therapy may come

    July 4, 2025

    Everyone in high tech has an opinion about Soham Parekh

    July 3, 2025

    All stages of TechCrunch regain early release prices for limited time

    July 3, 2025

    Kristen Craft brings fresh fundraising strategies to every stage

    July 3, 2025
TechBrunchTechBrunch

How this B2B payments startup landed JPMorgan's Max, Jack and Sam Altman as investors

TechBrunchBy TechBrunchJuly 17, 20246 Mins Read
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Telegram LinkedIn Tumblr WhatsApp Email
Share
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Telegram Email


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.



Source link

Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email

Related Posts

7 days left: Founders and VCs save over $300 on all stage passes

March 24, 2025

AI chip startup Furiosaai reportedly rejecting $800 million acquisition offer from Meta

March 24, 2025

20 Hottest Open Source Startups of 2024

March 22, 2025

Andrill may build a weapons factory in the UK

March 21, 2025

Startup Weekly: Wiz bets paid off at M&A Rich Week

March 21, 2025

Wayve CEO shares his key elements for scaling autonomous driving technology

March 21, 2025

Leave A Reply Cancel Reply

Top Reviews
Editors Picks

7 days left: Founders and VCs save over $300 on all stage passes

March 24, 2025

AI chip startup Furiosaai reportedly rejecting $800 million acquisition offer from Meta

March 24, 2025

20 Hottest Open Source Startups of 2024

March 22, 2025

Andrill may build a weapons factory in the UK

March 21, 2025
About Us
About Us

Welcome to Tech Brunch, your go-to destination for cutting-edge insights, news, and analysis in the fields of Artificial Intelligence (AI), Cryptocurrency, Technology, and Startups. At Tech Brunch, we are passionate about exploring the latest trends, innovations, and developments shaping the future of these dynamic industries.

Our Picks

Act 2 of Drive Capital – How Columbus Ventures Success After Split

July 5, 2025

Pets ready-made stem cell therapy may come

July 4, 2025

Everyone in high tech has an opinion about Soham Parekh

July 3, 2025

Subscribe to Updates

Subscribe to our newsletter and never miss our latest news

Subscribe my Newsletter for New Posts & tips Let's stay updated!

© 2025 TechBrunch. Designed by TechBrunch.
  • Home
  • About Tech Brunch
  • Advertise with Tech Brunch
  • Contact us
  • DMCA Notice
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Use

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.