Paris-headquartered Spendesk, an all-in-one spend management platform for finance teams, has raised €100 million in a Series C funding round.
The round was led by global growth equity firm General Atlantic while existing investors Index Ventures and Eight Roads Ventures also participated in the round.
With the current investment, Spendesk’s total funding reached €160 million. The startup will use the fresh funds to double its team size to more than 600 employees in the next two years. It will also accelerate product innovation in a bid to bring more automation and insights to every aspect of business spending, the press release stated.
Founded in 2016, Spendesk is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform that helps clients manage business expenditures. It claims to provide full visibility and control on all company spending — with every purchase trackable to a person, a project, and a budget.
The Spendesk platform combines payments, processes and data into a single platform, with virtual and physical cards for employees, expense reimbursements, invoice management, automated spend approvals, and budgets. The solution aims to automate day-to-day admin tasks, enabling finance teams to focus on strategic functions.
Rodolphe Ardant, Co-founder and CEO of Spendesk, said,
Rodolphe Ardant
“Work culture is becoming increasingly informed by our private lives. Employees crave more empowerment, agility and faster decision-making to be effective in their roles. And traditionally, finance teams haven’t been equipped with the tools that can support this transformation.
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.”
The startup will use and benefit from General Atlantic’s experience in scaling SaaS and fintech startups like OpenClassrooms, Doctolib, Typeform and Mollie, Ardant added.
In a blog post, Ardant explained that spending money at work has traditionally been a complicated and time-consuming ordeal. This slows down businesses and reduces their output, Ardant wrote. Moreover, it restricts talented finance team members from adding value to companies as they spend weeks chasing receipts, reconciling payments or manually updating budgets, he argued.
Therefore, Spendesk helps streamline the entire expenditure handling of a company. It allows non-finance employees to manage spending themselves, providing them all the guidance they need to make the right decisions, Ardant wrote. Using Spendesk, managers can track and control budgets seamlessly while senior leadership gets more visibility over cash flow and revenue, he added.
Aaron Goldman, Managing Director and Global Co-Head of Financial Services at General Atlantic noted,
Aaron Goldman
“Rodolphe and the Spendesk team have set out to become the operating system for business spending – delivering visibility, transparency, and control to the CFO suite. The company is driving much-needed digital innovation in antiquated finance processes and helping to define the spend management software category. ”
The new funding comes after Spendesk witnessed robust growth amid the pandemic. According to the press release, Spendesk has doubled its revenue and team size during the pandemic. Moreover, membership in Spendesk’s global finance community, CFO Connect, has also doubled and now has over 6,500 members worldwide.
Featured image (left to right): Aaron Goldman, Managing Director and Global Co-Head of Financial Services at General Atlantic and Rodolphe Ardant, Co-founder and CEO of Spendesk.
Featured image credit: Spendesk
