Mondu's makin' moves with $43 million in Series A round

Seven months post a $14 million seed round, Berlin-based B2B BNPL player Mondu has announced a $43 million Series A round raise led by Valar Ventures. The capital will be used to further scale Mondu’s product offer and hone in on customer acquisitions, as the company begins international expansion plans, beginning this some with the Austrian market. Since early October 2021, Mondu has raised $56.9 million.

Mondu was founded by seasoned merchants Malte Huffmann and Philipp Povel and focuses on a buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) offer for B2B marketplaces and merchants offering a flexible payment method with net terms, all without the financial and operational headaches often associated with the process.

“The concept of BNPL isn’t new in the B2B world; offline business trade has enjoyed it for decades. But as more companies increasingly move to digital, the need for BNPL for B2B online will grow immensely,” explained Huffmann. “We are on the verge of a "digitalisation boom", and Mondu wants to be part of that revolution and drive innovation within the B2B payments space.”

Keeping a keen eye on the developments in the BNPL space, Huffmann says that more than half of the existing Mondu team is focused on product, tech, and in particular, risk management. This risk management focus allows the company to provide highly accurate yes/no capabilities with it comes to an approval rating at checkout, ultimately giving Mondu a low-risk cost.

“While B2B BNPL is behind the consumer BNPL market, we believe there is a $200 billion opportunity just in Europe and the US, which is bigger than the global consumer BNPL market,” added Povel.

It should be of note, that while in a different BNPL segment, market leader Klarna is cutting costs across the board, namely with layoffs, Mondu is swimming upstream and hiring like wildfire, recruiting in the areas of tech, risk, sales, and operations.

Mondu’s $43 million Series A round was led by Valar Ventures existing seed investors FinTech Collective and Cherry Ventures participating alongside angel investors from Klarna, Zalando, and SumUp among others.

“BNPL for B2B sits at the intersection of three huge markets that are all in transition. The B2B payments market is immense, and its transition to digital has been accelerated over the past couple of years. The B2B eCommerce market is larger than B2C but is underserved by current offerings, and supply chain financing is a growing need, particularly for SMBs,” commented Valar’s Andrew McCormack. “Online transactions with financing options are limited. Mondu fixes all of these problems with its solution. It's a game-changer.”