Relevize

For the last thirty years, B2B has run on partners. The majority of revenue for nearly every enterprise software vendor — Microsoft, Salesforce, Cisco, ServiceNow, every modern SaaS company — flows through resellers, distributors, MSPs, and agencies. The way vendors motivate that channel is, fundamentally, with money. MDF (marketing development funds) pays partners to run trade shows, dinners, webinars, golf outings, anything that builds pipeline. SPIFFs (sales performance incentive funds) pay reps and partners cash bonuses tied to deals closed. Together, the global channel-incentive market is north of $50B a year in B2B tech alone.

The infrastructure that distributes that money was built thirty years ago.

A typical MDF claim looks like this: the vendor approves a partner to host a $20K trade show booth. The partner pays out of pocket. They run the event. Then they spend two or three hours hunting down receipts, building an "accurate invoice," and assembling a proof-of-execution deck — photos of the booth, attendee lists, lead capture screenshots — and submit the package. The vendor's AP team manually reviews everything, finds a missing W-9 or a mismatched line item, sends it back. Sixty to ninety days later, after several rounds of correspondence, the check arrives. Maybe.

Partners hate it. Vendors hate it. And the people approving the budget have no real-time visibility into what's actually driving pipeline.

The Problem: Channel Money Moves Like It's 1995

The fundamental architecture is broken. Pay-and-reimburse means partners are out of pocket for weeks. Manual claim review means AP teams burn quarters on paperwork. Disconnected systems mean no one — not the vendor, not the partner, and certainly not the CFO — can answer the basic question of which programs actually drove revenue. Channel teams are running multi-million-dollar incentive programs out of spreadsheets, email threads, and Salesforce custom objects bolted together with prayer.

This isn't a workflow problem. It's a payments-infrastructure problem dressed up as a marketing-operations problem.

Vendors don't have a partner problem. They have a payments problem.

A Card-Issuing and AI Engine for the Channel

Relevize is what happens when you rebuild partner payments from the ground up — using card-issuing for spend control, visual AI for claims automation, and a single-vendor payments platform that handles the back-office work no one wants to touch. Their platform does three critical things:

1. Issues guardrailed expense cards directly to partners. Relevize's Magic Cards (virtual or physical) replace the reimbursement model entirely. Vendors see every transaction in real time and can set program-specific guardrails — what merchants are allowed, what categories are covered, what dollar limits apply. Partners stop fronting their own cash. Vendors stop guessing.
2. Automates claims with visual AI. Receipts and invoices get read automatically. Proof-of-execution submissions get validated against program rules. Partners can reply to an SMS with a single photo and the system files the claim on their behalf. Time spent on review drops by ~90%.
3. Becomes the single vendor for all partner payments. No more POs, no more invoices, no more chasing W-9s. Relevize handles tax documentation, multi-currency transfers, and international payouts, so partner ops, AP, and procurement get the time back they were spending on paperwork.

The result is the first partner program where money moves at the speed of the partner's actual work — and the first one where the vendor can measure ROI on a partner program with the same rigor as any other go-to-market motion.

Relevize is already running at scale across the B2B software stack. Customers include Atlassian, New Relic, Imperva, Trimble, Verkada, Sonatype, Cybereason, Apptio, Chili Piper, WatchGuard, Scale AI, SAS, Ivanti, and Stratus, with channel partners from Evotek to Cask to GlideFast running their MDF and SPIFF activity through the platform. Customer feedback is unusually consistent across categories: WatchGuard's field marketing team calls it the best demand-gen platform their partners have ever used; SAS's global channels organization cites it as the reason their MDF operation finally feels standardized; Chili Piper credits the platform with letting them redefine what "partner-first" actually means.

Why We Invested

Three things had to be true at the same time for the partner-payments category to break open, and they finally are:

• The spend is too big to keep ignoring. Channel incentive budgets have grown into one of the largest line items in B2B go-to-market, and finance leaders are finally putting them under the same scrutiny as paid media or sales comp. The buyer is now the CFO and the CMO, not just the channel director.
• Card-issuing made spend control real. Modern issuer infrastructure (Stripe, Marqeta, and their peers) let a company like Relevize put a programmable card directly in a partner's hand — with category controls, real-time transaction visibility, and instant funding. The reimbursement model was a workaround for the lack of that capability. The workaround is no longer necessary.
• AI finally makes claims tractable. Visual AI that reads a stack of receipts, validates proof-of-execution against program rules, and flags only the items that genuinely need human review was a research problem two years ago. It's now production-grade. Relevize is one of the first companies bringing that capability to bear on a category that's been waiting for it.

The Relevize team understands channel programs from the inside — the workflows, the politics, the moment in the quarter when AP throws up its hands and the moment in the quarter when a partner threatens to walk over a $14K reimbursement that's been pending since the last earnings call. The product reflects that lived experience. So does the customer roster.

Channel revenue runs the B2B economy. Relevize is finally making the money behind it move at the speed of the work.