Outward VC are delighted to announce our investment in Mazepay, a Denmark based Fintech which has developed a next-generation B2B payments solution for corporate spend.
The €1.5m funding round led by Outward VC, follows the signing of commercial partnerships with Mastercard, Nordea and Eurocard. The business now plans to further develop its Nordic business and expand to other Western European markets. Co-Founder and COO Dan Korteegard Nielsen sat down with Outward VC to talk about the business and the opportunities that lie ahead.
B2B payments and purchasing in an enterprise should become as easy as it is for a consumer, and that Mazepay is the leading global facilitator for this.
Tell us about the team behind Mazepay and where it all began?
The founding team represents a balance of skills. My previous career spans enterprise sales and operations, where I was a part of the SailPoint journey (back then a small start-up which grew to a $4bn company). Soren is armed with a wealth of experience in international sales and business development and through his role as Corporate Sales Leader at SEB/Eurocard he learned first-hand the pain point in enterprise long tail spend. As a pair we have strong domain knowledge and are well versed to take on enterprise clients but there was a clear technology gap in the team which is when we met our talented Co-Founder and CTO Thomas.
Why this product needs to exist?
Large corporates have always struggled with long-tail procurement and B2B payments. The approach today is focused on sub-optimization of small individual tasks, which just moves the problem around in the organisation without truly solving it.
The questions we put to our customers are:
- Why can’t payments and purchasing in an enterprise be as easy as it is for a consumer?
- Why are enterprises still onboarding and maintaining long-tail suppliers on their own complex internal systems when the cost to process the payment can be higher than the purchase itself?
The emergence of cloud computing, AI based automation, the API economy and new virtual card payments have allowed Mazepay to create a new innovative approach to solving these problems.
Why are you excited about the market opportunity?
This is truly a global problem that all large enterprises struggle with, therefore the value we can create on a global scale is enormous.
B2B payments are expected to grow to $200tn by 2028 – 5x the volume of B2C payments. This combined with the fact that all the processes around the payment itself are still very manual and ineffective result in a massive opportunity to digitalize and automate.
We believe that Mazepay is uniquely positioned to solve these problems with a solution that can target both the payment and the surrounding processes – to deliver a rare combination of higher user satisfaction and higher compliance.
What are your main priorities over the next year?
The next year will be very busy as we expand our global partnership with Mastercard, where the focus will be on continuously improving the solution to increase the value for customers. We will also be entering into new markets (UK, France, Benelux and Germany) together with our commercial bank partnerships – a crucial and differentiated approach to the distribution strategy.
What’s the long-term vision?
That B2B payments and purchasing in an enterprise should become as easy as it is for a consumer, and that Mazepay is the leading global facilitator for this.
