Revenue platform Sequence has secured $20 million in new funding.
The company says its Series A round, announced Tuesday (Dec. 16), will allow it to continue what it calls the work of eliminating “the most manual and painful parts of revenue operations.”
This includes things like billing and invoice automation to real-time revenue recognition, with Sequence employing artificial intelligence to turn “days of work” into an automated workflow.
“Despite innovation in spend management, payroll and payments in the last decade, revenue workflows (pricing, billing, collections, revenue recognition) have lagged behind,” the company said in a news release.
Revenue and finance teams depend on “spreadsheets, manual processes, and fragmented tools that struggle with custom deals and modern pricing models,” Sequence added.
That means that workers are spending around half their time dealing with repetitive tasks like calculating invoices by hand, chasing unpaid bills and reconciling transactions, while revenue is lost because of complex, hard-to-track contracts.
“I started Sequence after a decade watching finance teams face an impossible choice: drown in manual billing work or rely on systems that break when sales teams close custom deals,” said Riya Grover, CEO of Sequence.
The new funding comes at a time when AI tools are helping small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) automate back office functions, as PYMNTS wrote earlier this year.
“Today, solo founders, accountants and operations managers are turning to AI to automate key back-office functions,” that report said. “From invoice generation and bill reminders to recurring billing and AI-assisted tax calculators, SMBs are using technology once reserved for large corporations.”
These businesses are making this switch without writing a single line of code — or at least, not traditional code, the report added. “Rather, they’re using natural language prompts, low-code platforms, and AI copilots to script their way to financial agility.”
The report cites the example of Greg Schwartz, founder of Household.tv, a boutique marketing agency in Manhattan. Sick of having to manually create invoices and chasing down payments, Schwartz used an AI-coding tool to write a script himself that integrates with his company’s back office and automates invoice creation for each project the agency takes on.
“It used to take me hours every week to generate invoices and follow up with clients,” Schwartz told PYMNTS. “The natural language interface of these tools transformed what used to be a serious engineering lift, or a third-party tool with limited customization, to a fully customized and automated part of my business. And on top of it, it’s helped with cash flow.”
Source: https://www.pymnts.com/