Topi raises US$4.5 million

The Berlin-based start-up was founded by former employees of Apple and Goldman Sachs. Topi focuses on B2B commerce.

Berlin-based startup Topi has closed a $4.5 million pre-seed round. Investors Index Ventures and Creandum led the round. Also on board were Hellofresh founder Dominik Richter, N26 founder Max Tayenthal, Thijn Lamers from Adyen's founding team and Fabian Wesemann, founder and CFO of Wefox. Topi aims to provide fast and frictionless payments for business-to-business (B2B) commerce worldwide.

The B2B payments market is expected to reach $120 trillion and be five times larger than the consumer payments (B2C) market by 2028. Although consumers already have many payment options to choose from, that's not yet the case in the commercial payments space, according to Topi. "B2B payments are the unsexy cousin of consumer payments, but the options are much bigger," says Jan Hammer, general partner at Index Ventures. "There are no fully digital end-to-end processes in B2B sales and no customer-friendly financing offerings," says Charlotte Pallua, co-founder of Topi. The result, she says, is "suboptimal purchasing decisions, inefficient use of capital, or lengthy bureaucratic processes." Topi now wants to change that.

The company was only founded this year. Co-founders Charlotte Pallua and Estelle Merle met while earning their MBAs at Harvard Business School in Boston: Pallua worked for Apple, where she experienced market needs firsthand. Merle spent four years at Goldman Sachs in London.