Monto, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based AI connector designed for any ERP, has just exited stealth with $9m in seed funding. In conjunction with the funding, CEO Maya Cohen replied to our questions about the company, the product, the funding, and future plans.
Questions from FinSMEs on funding round news.
FinSMEs: Hi Maya, can you tell us a bit more about yourself? What’s your background?
I’m Maya Cohen, CEO and co-founder of Monto. Like most Israelis, after graduating from school, I served in the Israel Defense Forces. Specifically, I was in the Air Force, where I got to meet amazing people, from technicians to combat pilots. After joining the army, I had the privilege of being the first employee of a startup, Clique, where I worked directly with the CPO and CEO. I also worked for a distributor of electronic chips, where I led the implementation project of Priority ERP. I earned a double degree in psychology and business administration before joining the Zell Entrepreneurship Program at Reichman University. I also had the opportunity to start my own venture with Nitsan Yerushalmi, CCO of Monto and my best friend from the academy. Besides that, I used to spend some time as a Pilates tutor, and I always enjoy a good workout.
FinSMEs: Let’s speak about Monto. What is the market problem you want to solve? What is the real opportunity?
We truly aim to solve the biggest problem in B2B – the getting paid piece. The simplest way to understand how bad the situation is for B2B companies that are trying to get paid is to look at B2C.
For most people, it’s obvious that if they’d like to buy a bottle of water in a kiosk, for example, the business will process their payment within a few seconds. Actually, this kiosk may be able to process thousands of transactions every day. In B2B, we can find a team of five people working a whole month just to get payments from, say, 200 enterprise customers. Thousands of customers a day are processed by one person, vs. 200 customers processed by five people.
The real opportunity we found is that unlike in the past 50-70 years, today, we have the technological infrastructure on both the supplier and customer sides, so we can come in between, create robust integration with AI that makes them smart, and finally solve this market.
FinSMEs: What are the features differentiating the product from competitors?
Monto learns, on behalf of the businesses, each one of their customers, to enable seamless and error-free communication and, eventually, to reach zero-touch payments, which is the real deal for us. Also, we are the first and only platform that offers a smart connection to all payment platforms to enable businesses to connect to all of their customers’ financial platforms and get paid easily.
FinSMEs: You just raised a new funding round. Please, tell us more about it.
I truly feel like we found the best ensemble of investors possible. Alex Niehenke and the expert team at Scale Venture Partners are what we were looking for—bold, smart, scale-focused and very savvy in our field. Together with the serial entrepreneur Ariel Maislos, Firsthand Alliance, Verissimo Ventures, F2 Venture Capital and other great angel investors, we formed an amazing team. In such hard times as, we have today in Israel, it was a humble, positive, small light for us.
FinSMEs: Can you share some numbers and achievements for the business?
We’re getting very close to reaching $1B in payments for our customers. We already have tens of paying customers who have designed the product with us and absolutely love it! We are fortunate to work with publicly traded companies, such as Shutterstock, TechTarget and fast-growing companies like G2 and Miro. We’ve built an amazing team—we just crossed 20 FTEs and counting. I just moved to NYC to start building our new office and Monto’s U.S. go-to-market team.
FinSMEs: What are your medium-term plans?
We aim to have thousands of B2B suppliers using Monto through their own ERPs, partner with the AP portals since they are our best friends and keep building an amazing team that will achieve our final goal—to solve B2B payments and create a whole new ecosystem of data at the intersection of suppliers and their customers.