Paystand has acquired spend management software startup Teampay to create what the companies are calling a “free B2B digital payments and spending powerhouse.”
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Teampay has raised $65 million since its founding in 2016.
The combined company serves over 1 million businesses running on a commercial blockchain for more than 1 million participants. To date, it has processed more than $10 billion in transactions, which it says represents nearly 2% of annual U.S. business-to-business payments.
“Teampay represents this new class of fintech companies,” Jeremy Almond, CEO of Paystand, told TechCrunch exclusively. “They have products for CFOs that really transform the way they can digitize their entire workflow. It’s what I would call a next-generation experience for users, and it fits well with our customers going through this really big modernization process.”
Paystand will continue to carry the Teampay brand, primarily because it is well known, he said.
Almond believes fintech companies should learn from consumer finance apps. In the B2B world, the process of sending and receiving funds is complex, slow, and involves fees. But consumers can send and receive money to each other using Venmo or CashApp. He wants Paystand to offer such features.
Teampay is the blockchain-enabled B2B payment provider’s second acquisition in two years. In 2022, the company purchased the payment platform Yaydoo. At the time, Paystand was valued at over $1 billion. Paystand has raised $98 million in venture capital since its founding in 2014. Teampay is not on the blockchain, but now Paystand can bring this functionality to both the accounts receivable and accounts payable sides.
“We believe it’s a trend toward consumerization of the business,” Almonds said. “Now we can offer both sides to 1 million companies.”
Although fintech has been a hot industry in recent years, the banking industry as a whole is grappling with a problem of legacy payment channels. This leads to higher fees, more intermediaries and delays. Almond is a long-time proponent of using decentralized financial infrastructure to solve the payments problem. Paystand uses the Ethereum blockchain as the engine for its Paystand Bank Network, which enables business-to-business payments without fees.
“Blockchain is the new cloud,” he said. “I know blockchain, Bitcoin and decentralized finance networks have some problems, but they represent a fundamental departure from the same central banking system that has existed since the 1930s.”
“A lot of people think that blockchain or decentralized finance isn’t there yet,” he added. “What we’re really proving is that if you create real value for businesses and finance teams, people will benefit.”