Paystand has acquired expense management software startup Teampay to create what the companies describe as “no-fee B2B digital payments and expenses.”
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Teampay has raised $65 million since its inception in 2016.
The combined company serves over 1 million businesses operating on a commercial blockchain to more than 1 million participants. It has processed more than $10 billion in transactions to date, which is advertised as making up nearly 2% of annual business-to-business payments in the US.
“Teampay represents this new breed of fintech company,” Paystand CEO Jeremy Almond told TechCrunch exclusively. “They have products for CFOs to really change the way they can digitize their entire workflow. It’s what I would call a next-generation user experience, and it’s right for our customers who are going through this really big modernization process.”
Paystand will continue to run it Teampay brand, mostly because it’s well-known, he said.
Almond believes fintech businesses need to learn from consumer finance apps. In the B2B world, the process of sending and receiving funds is complicated, slow and full of fees. But consumers can send and receive money to each other through Venmo or CashApp. These are the kinds of features that Paystand wants to offer.
Teampay is the second acquisition of the blockchain-enabled B2B payment provider in two years. It bought payment platform Yaydoo in 2022. At the time, Paystand’s valuation was north of $1 billion. Paystand has raised $98 million in venture capital since its inception in 2014. Teampay is not on the blockchain, however, now Paystand can offer this functionality to both accounts receivable and accounts payable.
“We think it’s a trend to consumerize the business,” Almond said. “Now we can offer both sides to 1 million businesses.”
Despite fintech being a hot industry in recent years, the banking industry in general has a problem of aging payment rails. This causes higher fees, more intermediaries and delays. Almond has long been a proponent of using a decentralized financial infrastructure to solve the problem of payment rails. Paystand uses the Ethereum blockchain as the engine for its Paystand Bank Network, which enables business-to-business payments with zero fees.
“Blockchain is the new cloud,” he said. “I know blockchain, bitcoin and decentralized financial networks have their share of problems, but they represent a fundamental shift away from the same central banking system that has been around since the 1930s.”
“A lot of people think that blockchain or decentralized finance is not ready yet,” he added. “What we’re really proving is that if you’re creating real value for businesses and funding groups, people will use it.”
