Swiss Expense Robot Raises CHF 1.7 Million From Swisscom and SIX

The Swiss FinTech startup Expense Robot uses artificial intelligence to automate your expense- and business credit card processes from the picture of a receipt all the way to the compliance checks, the Finance booking, VAT input tax reclaim, archiving and reimbursement.

This allows managers and the Finance team to focus on exceptions and outliers only. Max. 5 seconds of manual work per expense is their promise! To expand its mission, Expense Robot has raised CHF 1.7 million in a seed round co-led by Swisscom Ventures and SIX Group.

Experiencing the pain of manually preparing, tracking, checking, approving and processing expenses first-hand, the five co-founders set out to start an expense revolution. The goal was clear: maximum 5 seconds of manual work per expense and business credit card transaction and no shifting of work from the employee to the finance team. Manual work should also be limited to special cases that cannot be validated by the AI. A company with about 150 expense or business credit card users can save an entire full-time position thanks to Expense Robot.

After the successful prototyping- and testing phase of the initial cloud-based expense management service, Expense Robot went live with a first wave of customers in September 2019. Since then the team has already landed renowned global customers such as Swissquote, Kägi, Ameropa or SkyCell.

Expense Robot’s vision is to leverage Artificial Intelligence to fully automate all expense- and business credit card processes to save time and money, increase employee satisfaction, reduce complexity and ensure compliance. Unlike traditional digital solutions, the company’s technology simplifies the process for all expense management stakeholders – employees, managers and the finance team – all the way up to booking it into the ERP system. The flexibility of the technology further allows complex setups and thereby supports multi-legal entity, multi-currency and rank-specific policies.

The seed round was co-led by Swisscom Ventures and SIX with participation from Angel investors like Gian Reto à Porta, Founder of Contovista and Myke Näf, Founder of Doodle.

Philippe Sahli

“Having Swisscom Ventures and SIX as lead-investors is a strong signal of the market’s interest in our approach of digitizing the expense- and business credit card process end-to-end”

says Philippe Sahli, Co-founder and CEO of Expense Robot,

“our goal is to revolutionize business spending in general in order for our customers to focus on their daily business – imagine you pay something on behalf of your company and within seconds get reimbursed on your bank account while the correct entry with VAT is already in the financial system.”

Featured image: Co-founders of Expense Robot (f.l.t.r. Thomas Inhelder, Lars Mangelsdorf, Melanie Gabriel, Philippe Sahli, Devis Lussi)