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If you’re reading this you’ve heard the good news: Spendesk has raised €100M thanks to new funding from General Atlantic, with further investment from our existing partners. This brings our total funding to €160M, starting with our first seed round in 2017.
We’re obviously thrilled, and we have big plans for these new resources.
So in this post, I want to go more into the bigger picture: why we founded Spendesk, our gameplan, and how we plan to deploy these new funds. Our vision of spend management is essential to doing business in 2021, and this new funding shows that other smart business minds agree.
Let’s explore this further.
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The “why”: freeing finance teams to add real value
Spendesk was founded on the idea that spending money at work is far too complicated and time consuming. It actually slows businesses down and reduces output across the entire company.
And nowhere is this pain felt more acutely than in finance teams, where you have talented, thoughtful experts with a real impact to make. Imagine all the value they could be adding to companies if they weren’t spending weeks chasing receipts, reconciling payments, or manually updating budgets.
So that's the problem we've set out to solve at Spendesk: to create an all-in-one solution that liberates finance teams from the tedious tasks, and empowers them to focus on more impactful, strategic work.
We call this “spend management” - a concept that aims to streamline every aspect of spending & managing money at work: expenses, card payments, and invoice processing, but also approval workflows and accounting automation. And while our solution is about empowering finance teams, we deliver value to the entire business through the finance team, with a simple solution that employees love to use.
With Spendesk, non-finance employees are empowered to handle spending themselves, with all the guidance they need to make the right decisions. Managers can track and control budgets without hassle, and senior leadership has more visibility over cash flow and revenue. Essentially, Spendesk helps every employee focus on the work that matters most.
We’ve certainly benefited from using Spendesk ourselves during this funding round. We could tell a very detailed data story about our business with very little effort. Which brings me to our exciting fundraising news…
The “who”: new investors & familiar faces
Our Series C round was led by global growth equity firm General Atlantic. And we’re happy to welcome back all of our previous investors, most notably Index Ventures and Eight Roads Ventures.
I’m particularly excited to have General Atlantic joining the family. Seeing the work they’ve done with innovative B2B companies like Doctolib, OpenClassrooms, Typeform, and Mollie is truly inspiring. And I echo the way Managing Director and Global Co-Head of Financial Services Aaron Goldman describes Spendesk as “the operating system for business spending.”
As Aaron himself sees it, “[Spendesk] is driving much-needed digital innovation in antiquated finance processes and helping to define the spend management software category.” (That's Aaron in the header image of this post.)
We’re thrilled to have partners who see our vision so clearly and align with our goals completely. I’m also delighted to count on the renewed support of our earlier partners: eFounders, Index Ventures, and Eight Roads.
The “what next”
No smart company raises capital just for fun. We secured these funds to invest even more heavily in two key areas: our people and our product.
Our plan is to double headcount within the next two years, taking Spendesk well over 600 employees. This means many more open positions in virtually every team: Product & Engineering, Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, People, and Finance.
Career opportunities are already open, with more on the way.
Our other investment pillar is the Spendesk solution itself. In May 2021, we announced that James Colgan would join as our new Chief Product Officer. Having previously led product teams at Microsoft and Slack, James shares our passion for building transformative products, and is ready to help us bring more automation and insights to all aspects of company spending.
We have an ambitious task ahead: to affirm Spendesk’s position as the only spend management solution companies need.
We think we’re off to a flying start. But you’ll just have to trust me on this, we’ve only just begun.
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Rodolphe Ardant
Rodolphe Ardant is the co-founder and CEO of Spendesk, the all-in one-spend management platform helping businesses spend smarter. Before Spendesk, Rod was founder in residence at startup studio eFounders, COO for the car rental startup Drivy, and founder of Wozaik, a digital advertising startup acquired by Solocal Group in 2013.
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