It’s the last mile problem, B2B finance style. You’ve invested in every step of your customer experience to maximize conversion, satisfaction and growth. Marketing, website, sales process, product, customer success and support, it’s all great. Your customers love you and are happy to pay you. 

There’s just one problem: Your billing is having trouble keeping up with your sales team, and with your product and the ways your customers want to use it - and your finance team is tearing their hair out. Your engineering team would like to help, but the complexities of modern pricing are more than they can take on without diverting too many resources. If that sounds familiar, that’s exactly where Vayu comes in. 

My co-founders and I all come from strong fintech backgrounds. Between us we’ve seen a lot of how online payments works, and we’ve all tackled, in previous roles, the challenge of unsubstantial, limited or inflexible infrastructure which caused immense frustration and, crucially, limited company growth. All 3 founders experienced this specific issue in the area of billing. All 3 founders decided to do something about it. 

Billing Should Support Growth, Not Restrict It

Success in today’s fast-paced world requires flexibility. That can be a problem when rigid billing infrastructure holds you back. 

Companies often don’t think of the way that limitations around billing impact their growth, but I’ve seen it play out too often to ignore. For instance, when I was working in Go-To-Market, it was natural for the sales and product teams to think in terms of multiple pricing models to suit diverse combinations in the ways customers were using the products. 

A customer who was using a lot of Product A, some of Product B, and a little of Product C, ought to have different pricing compared to a customer whose usage was the inverse, for example. But engineering struggle to build the infrastructure to support your growth, and there simply wasn’t an out-of-the-box solution. There was no streamlined way to reconcile invoice and payment. So finance couldn’t bill customers flexibly, and we lost out because of it.

It makes no sense to have a situation where engineering can build that flexibility, and even go ahead and make it happen - but customers can’t use it, because the finance team can’t iterate on the pricing and monetize the flexibility that engineering created. 

The negative impact on growth often comes from a number of directions, including:

• New business lost because the inflexible pricing model doesn’t make sense to a client looking to use your products in unusual ways. (Leading to the company additionally losing out on organically discovering new use cases.)
• Reduction in upselling because customers aren’t willing to take a hit on pricing by upgrading to anything not already included in that pricing bundle/level.
• Hesitation and delay entering new geographies because of challenges around handling customers who work with multiple currencies and regulatory frameworks that impact billing. 
• Inability to iterate on pricing as the product, company and goals evolve. It’s not reasonable to expect finance teams to handle iteration manually, but traditional solutions lack automation. 
• Confusion and delay when it comes to offering the hybrid pricing many customers want now, so that they can easily combine fixed-rate and usage-based pricing to suit their appetite in any given month or quarter.

What’s needed is a single platform for this entire process, that’s easy for engineers to work with and provides an intuitive no-code experience for finance as well. Ultimately, that’s what works for customers - and the business. 

Vayu: Making Billing Growth-Focused

At Vayu, we’re aiming to solve a major B2B problem by working with great people - and making the business that we wished existed when we were embedded in B2B companies ourselves and struggling with exactly the issues that we’re now dedicated to solving. 

Each founder is most excited about a slightly different aspect of the transformation ahead:

Erez: “Right now, billing is a distraction for a lot of companies. It’s almost an afterthought, something that feels like it ought to be easy - but isn’t. Now that we’re making billing brilliant, companies can focus on customer experience and growth, as they should, knowing that billing is contributing to the same goals as everything else in the business. And they will know, because in-depth reporting will be automatically and intuitively available at all times.”

Shenhav: “Your billing experience is part of your product experience. If we can make billing a flexible, seamless, simple experience for our clients’ customers, the impact is enormous. It makes the contract-to-cash gap smaller - which is a significant upside given the impact on revenue predictability, growth and sales cycles - improves the chances of closing deals, increases customer satisfaction and likelihood of upselling, and shows that the company invests in customer experience every step of the way.”

Shai: “In my experience, engineering teams want to help solve pressing issues to make revenue collection and generation easier. But billing is just too complex, requiring an unreasonable amount of finance expertise to understand and get right. With Vayu, solving the entire billing challenge is easy for engineers; a simple API integration and you’re done. With AI driving product innovation in leaps and bounds, flexible pricing is needed more than ever. Now engineers can make that happen for finance teams and the company without breaking a sweat.”

Billing has been an overlooked problem for too long, meaning the issue has grown in significance. In an era where businesses are advancing towards advanced pricing models, embracing a mix of advanced and hybrid structures, including usage-based pricing - brilliant billing could not be more relevant or timely. We’re happy and proud to help.