Traxpay, the business-to-business (B2B) real-time payment provider, today announced a $4 million investment led by Earlybird Venture Capital, one of Europe's leading venture investors.
Traxpay is focused on redefining the online B2B payment process with an enterprise-level solution for sending and receiving payments across a supplier and/or customer network. The funding will enable Traxpay to continue its momentum with initial customers in Europe, as well as prepare for its Q3 expansion into the United States.
Traxpay also announced the appointment of John Bruggeman as chief executive officer. Bruggeman brings more than 15 years of C-level experience and has served on the executive teams of Cadence, Wind River, Mercury Interactive and Netscape. Bruggeman's extensive experience with enterprise software companies complements Traxpay's executive management team's deep payment and banking expertise.
"Online B2B payments represent a nearly $250 billion market with many inefficiencies, and we think it is a massive opportunity for innovation. We evaluated more than 10 companies in this space before choosing to invest in Traxpay," said Jason Whitmire, Partner at Earlybird. "Traxpay's unique blend of enterprise software, payments and banking expertise will deliver one of the most disruptive technology solutions since Paypal reshaped the B2C payments market. Moreover, we believe Traxpay has the potential to become the de-facto B2B online payment network."
Initial Customers Realize Significant Advantage with Traxpay
Traxpay has been developing its enterprise software solution in partnership with Accenture, a global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company that has extensive experience developing many of the world's largest proprietary peer-to-peer banking systems. Traxpay is leveraging the performance, security and reliability expertise of Accenture to jointly build its commercial online payment solution.
This quarter, the Traxpay solution has been selectively installed with initial customers across Europe, which historically has led the adoption of digital financial solutions.
"Our business is B2B collections and payments with leading corporations. The opportunity to fundamentally change the payment process to get better control over capital and enable real-time payments gives us a huge competitive advantage and is the reason we adopted the Traxpay solution," said Stephan Spieckermann, general manager, EOS Deutschland, business unit B2B, the leading German ISO-certified company for credit, arrears and receivables management in the B2B sector. "By using Traxpay's unique capabilities we are enabling our clients to reduce costs in payments reconciliation as well as to significantly increase customer retention."
According to the Boston Consulting Group, on a worldwide basis there were more than 65 billion B2B payment transactions globally in 2010, with a total market size valued at $245 billion. These payments are primarily handled with the same paper-based processes used for the past 20 years, which result in 1-5 days of inaccessible working capital. Traxpay is focused on enabling a real-time payment solution that gives companies instant access to funds without having to wait for standard payment terms.