The conversation around AI is shifting from a sense of wonder over how quickly AI emerged over the past year or so to how AI is being applied across specific industries.
As most of us know, AI has been running in the background for ages, making it easier for companies to make sense of massive data sets, speeding up credit decisions, and helping with countless other tasks we never see but have made our lives easier.
AI as a threat to search or as a tool allowing students to cheat on term papers is newer. And now that this initial consumer hype cycle seems to be dying down, attention (ours at least) is shifting to how companies are applying AI to transform industries.
My Localogy colleague Mike Boland and I have talked about this on our This Week in Local podcast. And Mike wrote explicitly about the shift from hype to execution at Localogy Insider.
For example, Slope is a company we recently came across that uses AI to revolutionize the payments space.
Founded by Alice Deng and Lawrence Lin Murata, Slope raised $30 million back in September, which brought its cumulative equity fundraising to $62 million since the company was launched in 2021. This is in addition to $125 million in debt.
All-Star Backers
Before we get to how Slope is using AI to change payments, it’s worth noting who is behind the company. The $30 million round was led by Union Square Ventures, and YCombinator was in there. But the list of individual investors is what stands out.
This is from Slope’s September blog post announcing the funding.
“Sam Altman, Stanley Tang from Doordash, Arash Ferdowsi from Dropbox, Zach Perret and William Hockey from Plaid, Jack Altman from Lattice, Alex Bouaziz from Deel, David Helgason from Unity, Eric Wu from Opendoor, Mathilde Collin from Front, Michael Tannenbaum from Brex, Rujul Zaparde from Zip.”
There are a lot of fintech heroes on that list. And yes, it’s that Sam Altman. According to the same post, Altman also inspired the company’s name. This Tweet was shared in the Slope blog.
I am not very familiar with the distinction between hiring for slope vs Y-Intercept. But loosely it involves short-term v. long-term. Slope can grow with you and Y-intercept can solve the problem right in front of you. Or something like that. So Slope hires for, well, slope.
OK, So What Does Slope Do?
Slope began with a vision to digitize the small business experience. Co-founder Murata was raised in Brazil by small business owner parents. He struggled to watch them fumble with stacks of paper as they struggled to manage the business.
“One of my strongest memories of that time was the stacks of paper used for everything: sales, the cashier, administrative paperwork, invoices, and so on,” Murata wrote. “It stuck with me how manual, painful, and messy transactions between businesses could be.”
So Slope began as a business designed to eliminate paper from the small business workflow. It has evolved into a company that uses AI to level up the efficiency of issuing invoices, collecting payments, and so on.
According to Forbes (which named Slope’s founders to its 30 under 30 Enterprise Technology list), “Over the last two years, they’ve expanded into a suite of tools that digitized the business-to-business buying and selling processes, including a module that uses AI to reconcile incoming payments with corresponding invoices,” Forbes wrote.
“They also offer fraud assessment, credit monitoring, and collections management tools, ensuring the customer is receiving every dollar they should from each transaction.”
