Vartana, a provider of managed checkout and BNPL options for businesses, has announced its launch with $57 million in seed funding.
The new capital injection reportedly includes $7 million in equity led by tech firm Audacious Ventures as well as $50 million in debt from i80 Group, a specialty finance company offering capital and support to various Fintech and Proptech firms.
The investment round also included contributions from Flex Capital and several angel investors including Shoaib Makani, Joe Kraus, Bipul Sinha, Allen Shim, Adil Syed and others.
The firm was established back in 2020 by Kush Kella and Ahmed Sharif who had been working at KeepTruckin and “dealt with the pain of broken contract management and payments infrastructure required to go from signed order to cash collected.” They established Vartana to equip firms with a managed checkout platform to “help them close more deals, faster.” The Vartana platform provides technology buyers “a variety of payment options while providing technology vendors tools to close contracts and generate sustainable cash with prepaid deals.”
Kush Kella, CEO and cofounder of Vartana, stated:
“We create a win-win scenario for both buyers and sellers of SaaS and other technology products. Buyers can solve budget constraints by paying on a schedule that works for them, while sellers get paid upfront and eliminate churn on deals. Our platform is the first-ever managed checkout platform to accelerate enterprise sales and we’re excited to work with stellar investors to help us bring it to market.”
Vartana works with mid to late stage tech firms and their resellers. The platform pre-approves clients in the sales funnel for payment plans via real-time automated underwriting tech. Clients may then choose their preferred payment options and “complete transactions within a few minutes through an integrated checkout experience.”
Nakul Mandan, Founder and Partner at Audacious Ventures, remarked:
“Vartana offers an innovative, new checkout experience for companies that are buying and selling technology products. With the built-in functionality for vendors to offer financing options to their customers, Vartana’s checkout offering is a no-brainer for B2B vendors and can be a huge boost for their sales teams.”
With the new capital, Vartana intends to invest in product development by “doubling its engineering capacity and support its growing number of vendor partners with new hires in sales and operations,” the announcement noted.
Peter Frank, Principal at i80 Group, said:
“Businesses today expect to have flexibility on how they pay. Vartana provides a turn-key checkout and payments experience for B2B transactions that scales with its customers. We’re excited to be a key part of accelerating Vartana’s growth,”
Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Vartana is a provider of “managed checkout and BNPL options for businesses.”
As noted in the release, Audacious Ventures is “an early stage venture capital firm that backs the most ambitious founders at the onset of their entrepreneurial journey.” Audacious seeks out force of nature founders and “helps them build an A+ go-to-market engine. Some of the firm’s investments include: Multiverse, WorkOS, Higo, Superpeer, Curious Cardinals and Vartana amongst others.”