• Ramp acquired procurement startup Venue.
• Venue will help Ramp improve its Procurement product with purchase orders that automatically sync up to accounting platforms, collaboration tools, and new approval workflows.
• Venue was founded in 2022. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Business finance automation platform Ramp announced it has acquired procurement startup Venue and that it has made improvements to its Procurement product automations. Terms of the deal were undisclosed.

Ramp expects the acquisition will help it expand beyond corporate cards as it tackles inefficiencies across more of the financial tech stack.

Venue was founded in 2022 to help businesses simplify how they review, approve, and manage the cost of vendor relationships. The company’s tool helps employees request what they need, while offering finance teams visibility into all vendor requests spending. A year after launch, Venue was supporting clients with 500 to 1,000 employees and had raised $1.2 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Exponent Founders Capital, and Basecase Capital.

“With Venue, we built a frictionless purchasing experience for employees and empowered businesses to buy what they needed while staying in-policy,” said Venue CEO and Co-founder TK Kong. “We’re excited to bring our expertise to Ramp and together help enable more efficiency, productivity, and seamless decision-making for our customers.”

Along with today’s acquisition, Ramp is launching improvements to its Procurement product with support from the Venue team. The combined team will offer businesses more control over and insight into employee spend, speed up review cycles, and help organizations save costs on IT and software spending. Now available for businesses using Ramp Plus, the new features include:

• Integrates the contract review process into Ramp’s approval workflow.
• Dynamic intake forms that capture every purchase request in one place.
• Purchase orders that sync to accounting platforms and offer auto-code matched invoices.
• Collaboration tools that allow all parties to comment and tag team members within requests.
• An activity feed to track procurement processes and keep record of approvals and changes made to requests and purchase orders.
• Seat Intelligence to track who is using the software and ensure businesses are getting their money’s worth from their SaaS contracts.

Ramp’s accounts payable product currently processes over $10 billion in accounts payable volume each year. The company, which is best known for its corporate card and expense management tools, counts more than 15,000 business clients.

Photo by Ihsan Adityawarman

• Talus Pay has acquired home services fintech infrastructure company Jobox.ai and B2B payment solutions company Clarus Merchant Services.
• Combined, the new entity will process more than $9 billion for 22,000+ merchant customers annually.
• Financial terms of the deals were not disclosed.

Texas-based Talus Pay announced two major purchases this week. The payments processing company has acquired home services fintech infrastructure company Jobox.ai and B2B payment solutions company Clarus Merchant Services. Financial terms of the deals were not disclosed.

Combined with the two new companies, Talus Pay now processes more than $9 billion a year for its more than 22,000 merchant customers. The fintech expects the acquisitions will help it grow its client base within the home and facility services verticals.

“We are excited to welcome both Jobox and Clarus to the Talus Pay team,” said Talus Pay CEO Kim Fitzsimmons. “We have tremendous end-to-end technology infrastructure and sales and service platforms. Adding Jobox and Clarus gives us additional proprietary software and scale in complimentary business-to-business industry verticals.”

Jobox was founded in California in 2016 to offer job matching, scheduling, payments, customer communications, and inventory management technology to U.S. home services professionals. The company currently serves more than 5,000 home services professionals across 39 U.S. states. Talus Pay will leverage its direct and reseller channels to scale Jobox’s open-source architecture across more industries, including auto repair, beauty, hospitality, non-profit, and service retail, among others. 

“Jobox is a terrific tool for underserved home and facility services professionals to help them efficiently run their businesses and increase their bottom lines,” said Jobox Co-founder and CEO Shay Bloch. “By joining forces with Talus Pay, we can accelerate our market share in the home services end market while having the opportunity to accelerate entry into new market verticals.”

Maryland-based Clarus, which has been providing payment services since 1999, currently processes more than $2 billion in annual card volume each year for a wide range of businesses, credit unions, wholesale distribution groups, and building materials distribution companies. After the acquisition is finalized, Clarus will be able to offer its merchant clients new solutions from Talus Pay.

Logistically, Clarus President Eric Pottebaum will join Talus Pay’s leadership team, serving as general manager of its Clarus portfolio. Bloch has been named Talus Pay’s chief strategy officer and Jobox Kaushik Pendurthi, also from Jobox, has been named chief technology officer.

Talus Pay, which itself was acquired by private equity firm A&M Capital Partners in 2017, processes 67.8 million transactions on an annual basis via sales agents and its network of financial institutions, independent sales organizations, independent software vendors, and value-added resellers. 

Photo by Lech Naumovich on Unsplash

• Blackstone has agreed to acquire Sony Payment Services.
• The firm is acquiring Sony Payment Services from Sony Group’s Sony Bank, which will still support Sony Payment Services as a minority investor.
• The acquisition marks Blackstone’s first investment in a Japan-based fintech company.

Private equity group Blackstone has agreed to take a majority stake in Japan-based Sony Payment Services (SPSV). The firm is acquiring SPSV from Sony Group subsidiary Sony Bank. Sony Bank will continue to support SPSV as a minority investor.

The acquisition marks Blackstone’s first investment in a Japan-based fintech company. The firm’s other Japan-based acquisitions have centered around the pharmaceutical industry. In 2002, Blackstone acquired AYUMI Pharmaceutical and Alinamin Pharmaceutical, a deal that marked the largest healthcare transaction in the market ever.

“We are thrilled to invest in SPSV… and expand our Japan Private Equity portfolio in ‘good neighborhoods’ – sectors with strong secular growth,” said Blackstone Japan Head of Private Equity Atsuhiko Sakamoto. “Digitization of the economy is a key trend around the world including Japan, and SPSV is exceptionally positioned to benefit with its sophisticated technology and robust customer base. We’re committed to bringing our operational and technology expertise and scale to support SPSV’s growth.”

Sony established its payment services group in 1995, and the group became a standalone company when it established SPSV in 2006. Headquartered in Tokyo, SPSV offers infrastructure for online payments processing.

“For the past 30 years, SPSV has led Japan’s cashless evolution, making payments safe and secure for customers,” said Sony Group Chairman and CO Kenichiro Yoshida. “We believe Blackstone, a long-standing partner of Sony Group, can help continue the legacy that SPSV has formed and support its next phase of growth.”

Combining Sony’s legacy and Blackstone’s expertise brings potential for SPSV to further innovate in Japan’s cashless evolution. This collaboration suggests there may be room for more strategic partnerships between traditional industry players and investment firms to foster innovation and drive advancement in the payments industry.

Founded in 1985, Blackstone counts more than $1 trillion in assets under management. The firm serves both institutional and individual investors with a wide range of portfolio companies and investment vehicles including private equity, real estate, public debt and equity, infrastructure, life sciences, growth equity, opportunistic, non-investment grade credit, real assets, and secondary funds.

Photo by Daniel Absi

• Digital commerce solutions provider Flywheel is being acquired by marketing and advertising company Omnicom.
• The deal is expected to close for $835 million in the first quarter of next year.
• Omnicom plans to integrate Flywheel’s Commerce Cloud product and transaction data into its audience and behavioral data.

Digital commerce solutions provider Flywheel has agreed to be acquired by marketing and advertising company Omnicom for $835 million. The deal is set to close in the first quarter of next year.

Owned by data and e-commerce optimization company Ascential, Flywheel was founded in 2014 and offers a suite of tools to help companies grow their digital commerce operations by selling more efficiently on marketplaces such as Amazon, Walmart, and Alibaba. Among the tools in the Flywheel Commerce Cloud are AI-powered content recommendations, automated fee recovery, retail performance analytics, and more.

Switzerland-based Omnicom offers services for advertising, strategic media planning and buying, precision marketing, commerce and branding, customer relationship marketing, public relations, healthcare marketing, and other sectors. The company has more than 5,000 clients spread across 70+ countries.

“The acquisition of Flywheel significantly broadens our reach and influence in the rapidly expanding digital commerce and retail media sectors, two of the fastest-growing parts of the industry,” said Omnicom Chairman and CEO John Wren. “Together, we will seamlessly integrate our offerings across retail and brand media, digital and in-store commerce, and CRM, ultimately delivering superior results for our clients.”

With 4,500 brands as customers, Flywheel and its Commerce Cloud manage “tens of billions”of dollars in product sales and “billions” of dollars in advertising spend on an annual basis across digital marketplaces. Once the acquisition is complete, Flywheel Commerce Cloud’s product and transaction data will be connected to Omnicom’s audience and behavioral data. Logistically, Flywheel will serve as what Omnicom is calling a “Practice Area.” Ascential CEO Duncan Painter will lead the newly created division.

Today’s deal is an example of how data-driven decision making has infiltrated the world of retail and ecommerce. Banks and fintechs can take note: leveraging data-driven insights is becoming tablestakes across multiple sectors, and is something consumers are growing to expect.

Photo by Jeremy Perkins