Taulia gives businesses discounts for paying their invoices early, gets $27M

Financing and managing supply chains can be challenging for some business, but one startup is providing them with an alternative means to keep the balance sheets going.

Taulia is a San Francisco-based provider of software for helping suppliers manage their financing, and today it announced it has raised $27 million in new funding, the company’s fourth round.

The company’s suite of products includes cloud-based invoicing, dynamic discounting, and payment tools to help customers’ cash flow, so they need not resort to loans if payments don’t come in. Taulia encourages buyers to pay invoices early in order to get discounts.

“If you look between 100 years back and today, payment terms have stayed the same or even stretched out,” said chief executive Bertram Meyer in a 2011 interview with VentureBeat. “A supplier has three ways to get financing. The first is bank loans, the second is credit-card borrowing (similar to the first), and the third is factoring. Taulia is replacing all three.”

QuestMark Partners led the round, with additional participation from Matrix Partners, Trinity Ventures, Lakestar, and DAG Ventures. The company will use the new funding to continue growing its customer base and team. This year, it added offices in Austin, Texas, and Sofia, Bulgaria.

It counts Coca-Cola Bottling Co. Consolidated, Pfizer, Pacific Gas & Electric, and Hallmark among its customers.

Taulia was founded in 2009 by Bertram Meyer, Markus Ament, Martin Quensel, and Philip Stehlik, and is headquartered in San Francisco. The company previously raised a total of $35.7 million in funding.