Launch HN: Balance (YC S20) – The first B2B checkout platform

We're Yoni & Bar and we’re building Balance, a platform for business purchasing online. Think Stripe (which we proudly call investors), but for B2B.

The tl;dr is that we’d love to hear your feedback, and hear your horror stories about how you’re doing B2B payments today, or what you think works well.

Ok, so.

Yoni and I spent a few years at Paypal working on e-commerce payments & risk strategies, and saw up close that while payments for consumer e-commerce/SaaS sellers are seamless, B2B payments are way more complex and are still a big pain.

Despite living in 2020, B2B sellers with a high transaction volume (over $2k) still need to handle annoying payment red tape like sending invoices, accepting bank wires or even chasing paper checks(!). Most deals require extending your buyers net 30 or 90 terms which essentially turn a seller into a bank, responsible for the payment completion risk, not to mention HURTING their cash flow. They have to consolidate all payments manually, employ people to assess credit risk and handle account receivables, in short - it’s all an expensive mess.

At our last startup (Yoni and I go waaay back) we needed a way to process payments from medical practices offering typical B2B terms: accepting wires & checks and extending net 30/60 terms. We tried using the go-to developer-friendly payment options (Braintree, Square, Stripe) but they all came in short for our B2B requirements.