Consumer payments is by no means a solved problem (I’ll trigger one hundred blockchain people if I say otherwise), but it sure as heck is a pretty improved one. Checkout is a breeze with modern tools ranging from Stripe and PayPal to Fast and Rapyd to Apple and Google Pay. If you happen to need financing, on-the-spot lending platforms like Affirm, which recently debuted on NASDAQ and is currently valued at $26 billion, will extend that financing nearly instantaneously.

Then you head over to B2B payments … and you recoil in horror as you migrate away from a utopian future of promise to the ruins of an antiquated past. A mash-mash of payment methods from paper checks to wire transfers get sent against invoices, none of which are automatically synchronized across financial information systems. Financing is complicated and offered by a bank through — gasp — an actual phone call. Shudder, because there probably involves a fax machine somewhere in that loop.

Balance is looking to modernize all of it, as fast as possible.

Balance offers efficient B2B payments that allows merchants to offer a variety of payment methods including ACH and bank wires as well as a variety of payment terms including payment on delivery, net payment terms, and payment by milestone. Behind the scenes, Balance underwrites the terms of those transactions requiring financing by evaluating the risk of the customer, the merchant and the specific payment terms selected. Balance is built on top of Stripe and offers all of Stripe’s credit card payment options, but then extends far beyond them.

Balance’s checkout flow includes options to pick financing terms and means of payment. Photo via Balance.

Take, for instance, your typical SaaS offering. Typically, employees will buy individual seat licenses to the software with their corporate cards (managed maybe with Brex), a payment facilitated through Stripe or PayPal. As a company spends more and more on that particular software, one of the two parties will reach out and negotiate a comprehensive enterprise rate for single payment. It is here that Balance becomes key. That full payment could be done on Balance, with net 30 payment terms using a bank wire all automatically synced against an invoice offered by the service to the customer.

B2B payments is a massive market measured in the tens of trillions globally, which is perhaps one reason why Balance has an all-star fintech investing syndicate behind its seed round. It raised $5.5 million from Tal Morgenstern of Lightspeed, Stripe and Max Levchin through his SciFi VC. Lightspeed previously backed Levchin’s Affirm. Balance was part of the summer 2020 batch of Y Combinator, although declined to appear at demo day and remained in stealth as its seed round had already been locked in. UpWest, which invests in Israeli companies heading to the U.S. market, also invested.

Balance was founded by Bar Geron and Yoni Shuster in late 2019 to early 2020 and came through their experience working at PayPal together. “PayPal is a key part of the story,” Geron said, describing how the duo learned about the consumer payments world. Shuster stayed on at PayPal, while Geron headed to Behalf, a company that also works on B2B financing and cash flow management. Geron said that Behalf was a “pain point solution” to the challenge of offering net payment terms, but that the company didn’t attempt to digitize the mostly analog model of payments. Geron saw an opportunity and linked up with Shuster to take a more expansive approach to the problem.

Balance founders Bar Geron and Yoni Shuster. Photo via Balance.

Our dream is to “make B2B payments as easy as card payments,” Geron said. “What we wanted to do is to make it as easy as Stripe … take a snippet of code and just put it on your site.” With that in place, Balance’s other features like invoice syncing and financing become instant features.

Through Y Combinator, the team learned that other tech companies constantly confronted these problems, and that they would serve as useful first customers. The critical customers though in Geron’s mind are B2B marketplaces where there are few solutions to synchronize the complexities of marketplace transactions. Geron says that “we have several customers in that space.” Another key customer segment are service providers that work on milestone-based payments, such as 20% upfront and 80% on delivery. “We automated [all that] and put it online,” he said.

Balance makes money on what is known as a “factoring fee” where it pays the merchant ahead of the payment from the customer. Geron noted it’s 2%, although the actual rate varies based on the risk involved.

The two founders are based in Israel, although like most startups these days, they have a distributed workforce.

Services like video streaming, gaming, media-intensive advertising and marketing technology are putting more strain on bandwidth and backend latency than ever before due to the surge of online traffic in the last year. But for most organizations in today’s usage-based cloud world, that can represent a huge cost in compute power — or a major investment in a company’s own latency technology — to try to address that.

This has created an opportunity for startups building optimization tools. Today, one called Granulate — which has built software for organizations to handle those loads more intelligently and cost-effectively — is announcing a round of funding after seeing a huge boost in business in the last 10 months, with customer growth up 360% and revenues growing 570%.

The Tel Aviv startup has picked up $30 million, a Series B, led by Red Dot Capital Partners, with previous backers Insight Partners, TLV Partners and Hetz Ventures, and new backer Dawn Capital, also participating.

The timing of this Series B speaks to the demand in the market right now: It comes on the back of Granulate closing a $12 million Series A only in April last year. Investors say that its business growth is what prompted them to re-up so soon.

“Granulate’s unique technology and impressive growth since their last funding round reflects a rising market demand for their game-changing optimization solution,” said Yaniv Stern, managing partner at Red Dot Capital Partners, in a statement. “For companies facing rising infrastructure costs or focusing on operating cost reduction, Granulate offers a solution that can drive additional improvement regardless of any other solutions already deployed by their clients.”

Granulate is not disclosing its valuation with this latest round, which brings the total raised by the startup to $45 million. 

The opportunity in the market that Granulate is targeting is the fact that media-heavy content, and services like e-commerce that rely on efficient responsiveness on sites and apps to keep people from abandoning their shopping carts, are all on the rise.

But as companies look to keep customers happy with better-quality services, they are also trying to keep an eye on margins and therefore want to keep infrastructure and computing costs low.

Granulate’s solution is software that sits at the server layer — either in the cloud or on-premises, as a customer prefers — that uses AI to detect workloads that a customer tags as important and prioritize them so that they work more efficiently. Granulate said that its software can improve response times by up to 40%, and throughput up to five times, while reducing costs by up to 60%. The company today has partnerships with AWS and Microsoft’s Azure and is in the “early stages” of talks with Google Cloud Platform.

Bigger tech companies like Netflix, Google and Amazon typically invest huge sums to build their own optimization technology, but it’s an area that smaller organizations (and you can still be huge while still being smaller than companies like Google) will not have the bandwidth — pun intended — to address in the same way.

“We are aware of similar things going on inside of Netflix as what we have built,” Asaf Ezra, co-founder and CEO of Granulate, said in an interview. “But to us, it’s a testament of how large you need to be to address this issue and the talent you need to hire to address the lowest-level issues.”

The company’s customers include at least one major retailer (which it can’t name), AppsFlyer, Period and PicsArt.

What will be interesting to watch is how the growth of 5G will affect the bigger problem: As Ezra notes, it will undoubtedly improve front-end latency.

“5G will not cannibalize Granulate,” he said. “In fact, when it becomes standard, the round trip time will be reduced for data, but the front end will be less of the ratio of the time, while the back-end latency will become more of the problem. 5G would solve only the access to your server, but not latency at the server itself.”

Longer term, it’s likely that Granulate will add more optimization and management solutions around those it already offers for latency, Ezra said, while also looking for ways to stand out apart from others in the same space. Competitors are in the process of some consolidation — witness Spot acquired by NetApp last June — so features based around a wider platform will likely be a key way to keep customers interested.

There is so much data sitting inside companies these days, but getting data to the people who need it most remains a daunting challenge. Polytomic, a graduate of the Y Combinator Winter 2020 cohort set out to solve that problem, and today the startup announced a $2.4 million seed.

Caffeinated Capital led the round with help from Bow Capital and a number of individual investors including the founders of PlanGrid, Tracy Young and Ralph Gootee, the company where Polytomic founders CEO Ghalib Suleiman and CTO Nathan Yergler both previously worked.

“We synch internal data to business systems. You can imagine your sales team living in Salesforce and would like to see who’s using your product from your customer data that lives in other internal databases. We have a no-code web app that moves internal data to the business systems of the office,” Suleiman told me.

Data lives in silos across every company, and Polytomic lets you build the connectors by dragging and dropping components in the Polytomic interface. This new data then shows up as additional fields in the target application. So you might have a usage percentage field added to Salesforce automatically if you were connecting to customer usage data.

The company actually sells the product to business operations teams, who would be charged with setting up a catalogue or menu of data sources that live in Polytomic. This is usually handled by someone like a business analyst who can configure the different sources. Once that’s done, anyone can build connectors to these data sources by selecting them from the menu and then choosing where to deliver the data.

The founders came up with the idea for the company because when they were at PlanGrid, they faced a problem getting data to the people who needed it in the company. The problem became more pronounced as the company grew and they had ever more data and more employees who needed access to it.

They left PlanGrid in 2018 and launched Polytomic a year later to begin attacking the problem. The two founders joined YC as a way to learn to refine the product, and were still working on it on Demo Day, delivering their presentation off the record because they weren’t quite done with it yet.

They released the first iteration of the product last September and report some progress getting customers and gaining revenue. Early customers include Brex, ShipBob, Sourcegraph and Vanta.

The company has no additional employees beyond the two founders as of yet, but with the seed funding in the bank, they plan to begin hiring a few people this year.

The growth of remote working and managing workforces that are distributed well beyond the confines of a centralized physical office — or even a single country — have put a spotlight on the human resources technology that organizations use to help manage those people. Today, one of the HR startups that’s been seeing a surge of growth is announcing a round of funding to double down on its business.

Oyster, a startup and platform that helps companies through the process of hiring, onboarding and then providing contractors and full-time employees in the area  of “knowledge work” with HR services like payroll, benefits and salary management, has closed a Series A round of $20 million.

The company is already working in 100 countries, and CEO and Tony Jamous (who co-founded the company with Jack Mardack) said in an interview that the plan is to expand that list of markets, and also bring in new services, particularly to address the opportunity in emerging markets to hire more people.

Currently, Oyster does not cover candidate sourcing or any of the interviewing and evaluation process: those could be areas where it might build its own tech or partner to provide them as part of its one-stop shop. It has dabbled in virtual job fairs, as a pointer to one potential product that it might explore.

“There are 1.5 billion knowledge workers coming into the workforce in the next 10 years, mostly from emerging economies, while in developed economies there are some 90 million jobs unfilled,” Jamous said. “There are super powers you can gain from being globally distributed, but it poses a major challenge around HR and payroll.”

Emergence Capital, the B2B VC that has backed the likes of Zoom, Salesforce, Bill.com and our former sister site Crunchbase, is leading the funding. The Slack Fund (Slack’s strategic investment vehicle) and London firm Connect Ventures (which has previously backed the company at seed stage) are also participating. The investment will accelerate Oyster’s rapid growth, and support its mission of enabling people to work from anywhere.

Oyster’s valuation is not being disclosed. The startup has raised about $24 million to date.

One of the great ironies of the global health pandemic is that while our worlds have become much smaller — travel and even local activities have been drastically curtailed, and many of us spend day in, day out at home — the employment opportunity and scope of how organizations are expected to operate has become significantly bigger.

Public health-enforced remote working has led to companies de-coupling workers from offices, and that has opened the door to seeking out and working with the best talent, regardless of location.

This predicament may have become more acute in the last year, but it’s been one that has been gradually coming into focus for years, helped by trends in cloud computing and globalization. Jamous said that the idea for Oyster that came to him was something he’s been thinking about for years, but became more apparent when he was still at his previous startup, Nexmo — the cloud communications provider that was acquired by Vonage for $230 million in in 2016. 

At Nexmo we wanted to be a great local employer. We were headquartered in two countries but wanted to have people everywhere,” he said. “We spent millions building employment infrastructure to do that, becoming knowledgeable about local laws in France, Korea and more countries.” He realized quickly that this was a highly inefficient way to work. “We weren’t ready for the complexity and diversity of issues that would come up.”

After he moved on from Nexmo and did some angel investing (he backs other distributed work juggernauts like Hopin, among others), he decided that he would try to tackle the workforce challenge as the focus of his next venture.

That was in mid-2019, pre-pandemic. It turned out that the timing was spot on, with every organization looking in the next year at ways to address their own distributed workforce challenges.

The emerging market focus, meanwhile, also has a direct link to Jamous himself: He left his home country of Lebanon to study in France when he was 17, and has essentially lived abroad since then. But as with many people who move from developed into emerging markets, he knew that the base of technical talent in his home country was something that was worth tapping and nurturing to help residents and the countries themselves improve their lots in life; and he thought he could use tech to help there, too.

Related to that wider social mission, Oyster has a pending application to become a B-Corporation.

Jamous is not the only one that has founded an HR company based on his personal experience: Turing’s founders have cited their own backgrounds growing up in India and working with people remotely from there as part of their own impetus for building Turing; and Remote’s founder hails from Europe but built GitLab (where he had been head of product) based on a similar premise of tapping into the talent he knew existed all around the world.

And indeed, Oyster is not alone in tackling this opportunity. The list of HR startups looking to be the ADPs of the world of distributed work include Deel, Remote, Hibob, Papaya Global, Personio, Factorial, Lattice, Turing and Rippling. And these are just some of the HR startups that have raised money in the last year; there are many, many more.

The attraction of Oyster seems to come in the simplicity of how the services are provided — you have options for contractors and full-timers, and full, larger staff deployments in other countries. You have options to add benefits for employees if you choose. And you have some tools to work out how hires fit into your bigger budgets, and also to guide you on remuneration in each local market. Pricing ranges from $29 per person, per month for contractors, to $399 for working with full employees, to other packages for larger deployments.

Oyster works with local partners to provide some aspects of these services, but it has built the technology to make the process seamless for the customer. As with other services, it essentially handles the employment and payroll as a local provider on behalf of its customers, but can do so under contract terms that reconcile both a company’s own policies and those of the local jurisdictions (which can differ widely between each other in areas like vacation time, redundancy terms, maternity leave and more).

“It has a few well-funded competitors, but that’s usually a good signal,” said Jason Green, the Emergence partner who led its investment. “But you want to bet on the horse that will lead the race, and that comes down to execution. Here, we are betting on a team that’s done it before, an entrepreneur experienced in building a company and selling it. Tony’s made money and knows how to build a business. But more than that, he’s mission driven and that will matter in the space, and to employees.”

Atlassian has made it clear for some time that it’s all in on the cloud, but now it’s official. The company stopped selling new on-prem server licenses as of yesterday. Perhaps to take away the sting of that move for large organizations, today it announced a new all-inclusive enterprise pricing tier.

Atlassian chief revenue officer Cameron Deatsch says that previously the company had offered a free tier and then standard and premium-level paid tiers. “And now this cloud Enterprise Edition will be our highest tier, and what this will allow is for the most complex deployments, the largest customers who need unlimited scale, the customers that have all the security and regulatory requirements, data residency, you name it, — that is what we’re launching starting [today],” Deatsch told me.

What the enterprise tier delivers is unlimited instances across the Atlassian product line for each enterprise customer. That means a big company with multiple divisions could, for instance, have 20 instances of Jira and Confluence deployed with one for each division and a central management console.

While the company is supporting existing on-prem server customers until 2024, the idea is to now move them to the cloud and this offering should help. One thing we have clearly seen is that the pandemic has accelerated the move to the cloud by companies of every size, and this should encourage the company’s largest customers to make the move.

“The reality is, the demand was there, which was great to see, but we actually had this huge pipeline of our largest customers, basically trying to build their plan over the next couple of years to get to our cloud. The general availability of our Enterprise Edition is going to accelerate that even more,” he said.

It’s a move the company has been working toward for some time, but it really began to take shape when they shifted their operations to AWS and rebuilt the entire stack as a set of microservices beginning in 2016. This was the first step toward being able to handle the increased kinds of workloads an enterprise tier would require.

The company reported earnings at the end of last month with revenue of $501.4 million up 23% YoY with over 11,000 net new subscribers, a record for the company. The new enterprise tier won’t help with new customer volume, but it should help with overall revenue as more customers look for cloud solutions and pricing that meets their needs.