How Paystand Grew Revenue Nearly 4x Without Taking a Cut of Payments

The $5 million was Latka’s number

Latka promised not to push after one more question: “When do you think you’ll pass, call it, 5,000,000 in ARR in terms of a run rate?” Almond’s first answer was “We’re not far off from doing that.” Asked whether it would happen that year, he said “We’re not very far off now,” and then, “Could be this year, whatever.” The episode went out in October 2018 as “B2B Version of Venmo About to Pass $5m in ARR”, which is fair only if the $5 million is read as Latka’s milestone rather than Paystand’s figure. Latka’s recap put it a quarter or a few quarters away; that timing is his as well.

Almond gave no revenue, ARR or MRR figure in any form. Any 2018 revenue number credited to this interview did not come from him.

A subscription instead of a percentage

His one-line description was Venmo for companies: “simple way to think of us is what Venmo does between consumers, making payments digital. We do for commercial companies.” When Latka offered Bill.com as the comparison, Almond agreed up to a point (“Yeah. I think so.”) and then drew the line at the rails: “bill.com is really about automation, and what we are is actually changing the payment network.” Paystand, he said, owned its own network and used “something called the blockchain” to run it.

Paystand’s argument in 2018 was that business-to-business payments did not need to carry a card-style fee. Almond’s example was an insurer collecting premiums, stuck between paper checks, which are slow and risk a lapse in coverage when money arrives late, and credit cards, which he said cost “3% for you to receive.” For a company that knows its customer and bills on agreed terms, net 30 and the like, he saw no reason to pay that: “I know this company. I’ve got terms associated to it. ... the credit card model just doesn’t work there.”

Paystand’s alternative was a flat fee. Asked how it made money without taking a percentage, Almond reached for Netflix. The aim was to move the industry from a transactional model, which he likened to renting from Blockbuster, “to a fixed cost SaaS model,” with a monthly subscription that is “sort of all you can eat.” Latka asked what the average customer paid.

Yeah, so on average our customers pay us about $1,500 a month. They go up much higher and there’s a few that’s a little lower than that.

That is an average across customers, not a list price. Latka guessed at a volume-based tier, and Almond did not take it up. He described cohorts by the size of the customer company instead and said “the cost for us is just around support”: a customer with 5,000 employees needs more of it than one with five.

He sized the opportunity with a market figure, not a Paystand one: “there’s $18,000,000,000,000 in commercial payments in The US alone still done in paper checks, so we’ve got a really long way to go.”

Fifty thousand businesses, and which side pays

Almond put the network at “about 50,000 businesses,” and Latka did the obvious multiplication, 50,000 times $1,500 a month. He knew the result was wrong before he said it (“My math is gonna be wrong here, you’re gonna have to correct me”) and asked where. The answer is the core of the model. The 50,000 counts both sides of every payment, the businesses being paid and the businesses paying. “Both sides. Yeah. Exactly.” Paystand charges the side that gets paid.

...we basically charge for the receivable side of the product because effectively, you know, you as a CFO care about speeding up your time to cash, getting your money quicker and at lower cost.

Most of the industry, he said, charges the paying side, for what he called “a vitamin problem”: nice for accounts payable, not a boardroom priority. On the paying side he said only that Paystand charges “a very, very different amount on the payable side than we do on the receivable side.” How many receiving businesses there were he would not say: “we don’t publish those numbers.” He described the network as asymmetric, with most receiving companies having at least a hundred customers of their own, which is a ratio, not a count. When Latka pressed on whether Paystand served a few large accounts or many mid-market ones, the recording loses the answer: the audio breaks into one repeated word for about ten seconds, so there is no answer to report.

Volume, banks and churn

On volume Almond was specific about the unit: “at this point, we’re doing tens of million a day.” Latka had guessed far higher; the daily figure is the answer.

Much of Paystand’s cost sat in the system it was trying to replace. “So we federate with 18,000 banks,” he said, which means setting up accounts and paying for the legacy infrastructure that settles money back into customers’ banks. He framed that as meeting customers where they are, and went back to Netflix: red envelopes of DVDs first, streaming later. The banks were not customers. “We don’t sell to the banks. We certainly partner with them.” He mentioned a partnership with Silicon Valley Bank and First Data announced “a couple weeks ago”; Paystand’s press page dates it to July 18, 2018, when Paystand was selected for Commerce.Innovated., an accelerator program run by SVB and First Data. That fits a recording in early August. His view of the division of labour: “they’re not software companies, and companies like us are not banks.”

Growth was coming almost entirely from businesses joining the network: “It’s mostly new... Net new right now.” Selling more into existing accounts could wait; “right now, we’re really focused on growing the network.” The retention case he made was structural. On a net basis, he said, “we have negative churn,” and he confirmed Latka’s reading that this meant net negative revenue churn annually. His reason: “once you get people in the payment network that’s entirely digital, you’re not moving back to paper check.” He gave no churn percentage.

Paystand in August 2018

“We’re still small, 30 people,” Almond said, and repeated the 30 twice more when Latka could not tell whether he had said thirty or thirteen. Most of the team worked in Scotts Valley. There was a small office in Guadalajara, opened at the beginning of 2018 and growing quickly, and a very small office in Canada that he described as basically a fulfillment center.

His funding figure was “about 12,000,000 to date, more or less.” The rounds with published amounts by then come to $7 million: the $1 million seed of April 2014 and a $6 million Series A in November 2017. LEAP Global Partners also invested in July 2017 without a disclosed amount, which is one reason the published amounts fall short of his roughly $12 million.

Since the interview

Paystand has kept raising, buying and growing. None of the announcements below states a revenue figure; the growth rates are the company’s own claims or its CEO’s, dated as published.

• February 2020 · Series B Paystand raised $20 million, per the VentureBeat headline listed on its press page.
• July 23, 2021 · Series C A $50 million round led by NewView Capital, with SoftBank’s SB Opportunity Fund and King River Capital. Almond told TechCrunch it brought Paystand’s total funding to $85 million. The four rounds with published amounts, seed through Series C, add up to $77 million, $8 million short of his total.
• August 2022 · Yaydoo Paystand acquired Yaydoo, a Mexican accounts-payable and cash-flow software company whose 155 staff joined (Paystand blog, August 3, 2022). Crunchbase News listed Paystand among that month’s new unicorns, “reaching a unicorn valuation through the transaction.” Almond told TechCrunch, in a piece published August 7, 2022, that Paystand had seen over 700% revenue growth in the previous three years, and TechCrunch put the combined company at nearly 400 employees.
• August 22, 2022 · Inc. 5000 Paystand made the Inc. 5000 list for the third straight year, with what it called “a growth rate of 876% over three years.”
• April 25, 2024 · Teampay Paystand acquired Teampay, a spend-management software company, and said its network “now touches over one million businesses.”
• November 7, 2025 · Bitwage Paystand acquired Bitwage, whose platform it had used for years to pay international vendors and contractors in stablecoins.

The fee idea has survived the changes. As of October 2026, Paystand’s homepage says accounts receivable customers “pay a flat annual platform fee, with no per-transaction charges for payments made through the Paystand Network.” The 2018 version was a monthly subscription averaging about $1,500. The current one is annual and priced on “the products, payment volume, integrations, and workflows a business needs,” so volume now shapes the price, but each payment still carries no fee. Almond remains co-founder and CEO, according to the company’s about page. For the figures GetLatka tracks today, see Paystand’s profile; the full recording and transcript are on the interview page.