Vartana has raised $12 million in a Series A round and launched its B2B sales closing and financing platform.
The platform tackles the friction that is involved in handling payment terms during a B2B sale, including the length of time involved in arranging a bank loan and the difficulty involved in assessing credit for vendor trade credit, Vartana said in a Tuesday (Jan. 24) blog post.
“We built Vartana to solve this problem — Vartana embeds at the point-of-sale to extend payment terms and installment plans to buyers without friction,” Vartana Co-founder and CEO Kush Kella and Co-founder and Head of Finance Ahmed Sharif said in the post.
Kella was exposed to the market of hardware and software financing while working at a tech company — and saw that it involved a lot of emailing back and forth to get approvals, a lot of offline communication and a lot of exchanging of copies of voided checks to set up automated clearing house (ACH) payments, he told PYMNTS in an interview posted in February 2022.
“That was my ‘aha’ moment because that industry has lagged 10 or 20 years behind the consumer industry,” Kella said at the time.
PYMNTS research has found that B2B buyers who have taken to online commerce now have higher expectations for their customer service and the terms they receive from their vendors.
In fact, 85% of B2B buyers value a positive experience with their partners as much as their products and services, and 69% of B2B buyers want their partners to provide novel ways for them to access products and services, according to the “Global B2B Payments Playbook,” a PYMNTS and Worldpay collaboration.
The Vartana platform provides sales reps with the payment flexibility they need to close the deal, helps finance teams set firm rules to protect revenue and assures legal teams that contracts will be signed in a compliant manner, according to the blog post
The platform is also powered by the firm’s proprietary Capital Marketplace that enables the offering of market competitive rates through partnerships with banks, funding partners and lenders, the post said.
“As operators, we have seen the inherent difficulties in the sales process, especially the pain salespeople face in the last mile of a sales transaction — custom payment terms, signature collection, legal back and forth, and pricing approvals are a few of the problems that plague the offline sales process,” Kella and Sharif said in the post.
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