Spendesk raises $118 million for its corporate spend management service

Published July 21, 2021

French startup Spendesk has announced earlier today that it has raised a $118 million funding round (€100 million) led by General Atlantic. Overall, the company has raised $189 million (€160 million) since its inception.

Existing investors Index Ventures and Eight Road Ventures participated once again in today’s funding round.

Spendesk, as the name suggests, focuses on all things related to spend management. Originally founded in startup studio eFounders, the startup first offered virtual and physical company cards for employees. While corporate cards are quite popular in the U.S., many small and medium companies in France can’t give a card to every single employee.

That’s why spending your company’s money can be a cumbersome process. You can borrow your boss’ card but they’ll have to trust you with it. You can pay with your own personal card but you want to be reimbursed as quickly as possible.

By combining a SaaS platform with corporate cards, it opens up a ton of possibilities. For instance, you can create an approval workflow for expensive purchases. You can set different budgets for different teams.

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Over time, Spendesk has expanded beyond cards to manage expenses and invoice processing. It tries to automate some repetitive accounting tasks as well. Employees are automatically reminded that they have to attach a receipt for each transaction. You can export everything to Xero, Datev, Sage, Cegid or Netsuite.

If that pitch sounds familiar, it’s because there are a handful of European startups that are all doing well in this field. Soldo recently raised $180 million while Pleo snatched $150 million at a $1.7 billion valuation.

And yet, Spendesk doubled its revenue over the past year. Its team grew from 150 to 300 employees and it plans to double its headcount again over the next couple of years.

It means two things — the market opportunity is important and many customers are switching from old school workflows to modern SaaS products. That’s why three startups can grow at the same time.

“Traditionally, finance teams haven’t been equipped with the tools that can support this transformation,” Spendesk co-founder and CEO Rodolphe Ardant said in a statement. “In the past few years we have built the reference spend management solution for finance teams in Europe, which frees businesses and their people from administrative constraints of spending and managing money at work. While our solution is about empowering finance teams, we are actually delivering value to the entire business through the finance team.”

Spendesk currently has 3,000 clients, including Algolia, Soundcloud, Curve, Doctolib, Gousto, Raisin, Sezane and Wefox.

Image Credits: Spendesk

Payhawk raises $20M to unify corporate cards, payments and expenses

Published April 19, 2021

Fintech startup Payhawk has raised a $20 million funding round. QED Investors is leading the round with existing investor Earlybird Digital East also participating. Payhawk is building a unified system to manage all the money that is going in and out.

Essentially, companies switching to Payhawk can replace several services they already use and that didn’t interact well with each other. Payhawk lets you issue corporate cards for your employees, manage invoices and track payments from a single interface.

After signing up, customers get their own banking details with a dedicated IBAN. You can connect with your existing bank account, load funds to your Payhawk account and start using it in multiple ways.

Compared to other companies working on similar products, Payhawk gives each customer their own IBAN, which means they can receive third-party payments.

One of the key features of Payhawk is that customers can issue virtual and physical cards for employees with different rules. You can set up a team budget, configure an approval workflow for large transactions and let Payhawk handle receipt collection from those card transactions.

You can upload invoices to manage them through Payhawk. The startup tries to automatically extract data from those invoices for easier reconciliation. Payhawk also lets you reimburse employees. The service acts as a single source of truth for your company’s spending. Finally, you can connect Payhawk with your existing ERP system.

As a software-as-a-service solution, you pay a monthly subscription fee that will vary depending on optional features and the number of active cards. Clients include LuxAir, Lotto24, Viking Life, ATU, Gtmhub, MacPaw and By Miles. Overall, the startup has 200 clients.

The company has been growing nicely as revenue doubled in Q1 2021. It currently accepts clients in the European Union and the U.K. but it already plans to expand beyond those markets. Up next, Payhawk plans to launch credit cards, more currencies and tighter integration with corporate bank accounts.

Fintechs could see $100 billion of liquidity in 2021

Ramp is a corporate card focused on helping you spend less

Published February 12, 2020

Meet Ramp, a new startup that offers corporate credit cards with 1.5% cash back on everything. The company thinks that a cash-back program combined with an analysis of your payments to help you spend less is more valuable than alternative corporate card offerings.

Ramp is launching publicly today and has raised $25 million in funding from Keith Rabois, Coatue, BoxGroup, Conversion Capital, Soma Capital, Backend Capital and more than 50 business angels.

The startup doesn’t charge fees. All your employees can have a white Visa card for $0 per month. There are no foreign transaction fees and no interest either. The company plans on making money with interchange fees — like all card issuers, Ramp will get a very very tiny cut on all transactions.

One of the main selling points of Ramp is that it offers you control and visibility. You can set different limits for each employee, create as many cards as you want and set up spending rules. The service also helps you centralize receipts and attach them to each expense. There are some integrations with accounting software.

Like Brex, Ramp is going to work particularly well with high-growth startups. When you sign up, Ramp doesn’t require personal guarantees. You also get higher spending limits than what you’d get from traditional corporate cards — Ramp says you can expect limits that are 10 to 20 times higher than typical limits.

Unlike Brex, Ramp doesn’t have a complicated point-based reward system. You’re not going to earn more points when you order a Lyft or book flights through Brex. Instead, with Ramp, you get 1.5% back on all your purchases — it can be a recurring subscription, an expensive flight, a team lunch… 1.5% on everything.

Existing customers include some well-known startup names, such as Ro, Candid, Better, Eight Sleep and Truebill.

Ramp goes one step further by analyzing how you spend money. For instance, if you’re paying multiple subscriptions to the same service, Ramp is going to flag that as a duplicate subscription. If you’re spending an unusual amount of money on a specific service, Ramp will recommend a lower subscription tier.

The startup also offers free credits for dozens of third-party services, such as Amazon Web Services, Amplitude, Plaid, Datadog, DocSend, Notion, Twilio, Sendgrid, etc. Overall, it represents $175,000 in free credits.

Ramp was founded by Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh. The team previously founded Paribus, a startup that helps you save money on online purchases that was acquired by CapitalOne.

It’s a solid offering overall. There are probably many startups that are looking for a simple corporate card solution with a cash-back program. And the fact that Ramp wants to help you spend less shows that the startup cares more about providing a good user experience over generating quick revenue.