Pay-i, a B2B fintech startup streamlining payments between businesses, has raised $4.9 million in seed funding to advance its mission of eliminating friction from corporate transactions. The round includes participation from top-tier investors: Fuse Partners, Tola Capital, Firestreak Ventures, Pear VC, Gaia Capital, and a network of strategic angel investors.

Led by David Tepper, Erik Winters, and Doron Holan, the founding team brings together deep experience in enterprise payments, financial software, and SaaS infrastructure. Pay-i is building the next generation of intelligent B2B payment infrastructure, optimized for flexibility, automation, and trust.

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Tackling B2B Payment Complexity at Its Core

While consumer payments have gone digital, fast, and global, B2B payments remain stubbornly outdated. Most companies still rely on paper invoices, manual approval chains, legacy ERP integrations, and rigid payment cycles that slow down cash flow and introduce errors.

Pay-i is tackling this issue head-on with a modern, API-first platform designed for automated invoicing, real-time transaction tracking, smart payment routing, and embedded compliance checks. Whether a company needs to pay international vendors or manage recurring vendor agreements, Pay-i provides a transparent and intelligent layer over traditional banking rails.

This isn’t just another payment processor. It’s infrastructure designed for cross-border B2B workflows, built for businesses with complex needs and fast-moving teams.

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Why This Funding Matters Now

The B2B payments market is massive - and ripe for disruption. According to Goldman Sachs, global B2B payments are expected to reach $200 trillion annually by 2028, yet 90% of these transactions still rely on outdated, non-integrated systems. This inefficiency doesn’t just hurt businesses - it hampers economies.

At the same time, companies are facing mounting pressure to optimize working capital, reduce vendor disputes, and modernize procurement and AP processes. Pay-i enters this environment with a platform that replaces emails, spreadsheets, and PDFs with smart, scalable workflows that connect directly into accounting systems and payment gateways.

And this is where most fintech founders miss the mark: they focus on the transaction itself, not the process around it. What Pay-i deeply understands is that B2B payments aren’t just about sending money - they’re about navigating trust, timing, and context across departments, currencies, and regulatory zones. If you're building in fintech, this is the insight - the real moat isn’t in speed or even cost savings. It’s in becoming the shared operating layer across finance, procurement, and compliance. When your product is the platform that all three depend on, switching costs become insurmountable.

By embedding into approval workflows, reconciliation systems, and vendor logic - not just payment rails - Pay-i positions itself as infrastructure, not just software. That’s how you create category leadership in an enterprise environment: not by being faster, but by being indispensable.

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Meet the Founders: Deep Roots in Fintech and Enterprise Software

The founding team of David Tepper, Erik Winters, and Doron Holan brings a unique mix of enterprise software leadership, regulatory know-how, and B2B operations experience. Before Pay-i, they held leadership roles across high-growth fintech startups, global banks, and cloud SaaS companies.

Together, they’ve seen firsthand how outdated financial processes kill growth - and they’ve designed Pay-i to be the opposite: simple, fast, and reliable enough to serve high-volume enterprise payments with zero compromise on compliance or controls.

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Industry Outlook: The B2B Payments Gold Rush

The B2B payments market is in the midst of a transformation. Fintech investments in this space are expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.5%, reaching over $70 billion in B2B fintech spend by 2027, according to Deloitte. Driving this growth is the increasing need for automation, real-time payments, and cross-border support.

More than 64% of CFOs now rank digital transformation of finance operations as a top 3 priority, yet most still rely on processes that were designed for a world of fax machines, not APIs.

That’s where Pay-i fits in. By providing an open, modular platform that integrates with ERP, accounting, procurement, and treasury tools, Pay-i positions itself not just as a solution - but as infrastructure. Their goal: to become the “Plaid of B2B payments,” offering a universal layer for initiating, managing, and reconciling business transactions globally.

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What’s Next for Pay-i?

With this $4.9 million in fresh funding, Pay-i will scale its engineering and product teams, expand into new verticals like logistics, manufacturing, and SaaS marketplaces, and roll out key features including:

• AI-powered reconciliation tools
  
• Real-time FX and multi-currency support
  
• Smart routing for international vendor payments
  
• APIs for embedded payments in B2B marketplaces
  

They’re also building a compliance layer designed for heavily regulated industries, ensuring every payment includes real-time screening, audit logging, and customizable approval chains.

As more companies rethink their finance tech stack, Pay-i is poised to become the backbone of modern B2B payments - fast, transparent, and always in sync.

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