Image credit: Payhawk
Payhawk, a London-based fintech startup that provides spending software to simplify expenses, payments, and card spending for growing businesses, announced that it has raised $112M (approx €99.44M) in its Series B round of funding.
With this, the company’s valuation jumped to $570M (approx €506.1M) in just three years after its inception.
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The news comes after the London-based platform’s $20M (approx €16.55M) Series A round of funding announced earlier this year in April. The funding was led by QED Investors, which has a strong track record of investing in 18 fintech unicorns including Klarna and Nubank.
Who has invested in Series B round
The current round was led by San Francisco-based investor Greenoaks, a firm that has a strong track record of investing in high-growth technology companies such as Gorillas, Robinhood, Stripe and Brex.
Speaking on the development, Patrick Backhouse, Partner of Greenoaks, says, “Running a business requires significant manual work that consumes employee time and introduces substantial room for error. Payhawk turns a fragmented process into a seamless one, providing a single place to manage the entire spending lifecycle from company cards to expenses and bill payments to invoices. We think that painful expense reports and bill payments should be a thing of the past, and we are excited to partner with Payhawk on the way to getting there.”
Besides Greenoaks, Payhawk’s existing investors QED Investors, Earlybird Digital East and Eleven Ventures also participated in this round.
Platform for payments and expense management
Currently, finance teams use multiple disconnected tools for payments, invoices, and expense management in order to run a business and this also increases the amount of manual work done. According to Payhawk’s research, for any invoice, either €5 or €50,000, it takes up to 15 minutes and three people on average to execute a single bank transfer.
This is where Payhawk looks to make a difference.
Hristo Borisov, CEO and Founder at Payhawk, says, “We are building enterprise software running on global payments infrastructure that automates all spend processes. Our strong product background and engineering team allows us to move at break-neck speed. This, in turn, will enable global enterprises and fast-growing technology companies to transform how they manage their company spending, and improve efficiencies while unlocking employee time to be better spent elsewhere.”
The company claims to reduce the amount of manual work by combining those key elements and closing the gap between banks and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems in a single platform and therefore acting as a one-stop-shop for finance teams. This helps finance teams reduce manual work, keep a tight control of budgets in real-time and fully automate spending across every payment method.
About Payhawk
The company was founded in 2018 by Boyko Karadzhov, Hristo Borisov, and Konstantin Djengozov.
Payhawk provides expense management software to businesses and allows them to collect and read expenses in real-time, provides notifications with receipts and invoices after every transaction, sends automatic reminders to employees to submit payment proofs, and offers both physical and virtual cards.
In addition, the platform also offers the option to set a spending limit and enable or disable ATM cash withdrawals. Some of its other features include automated data extraction from invoices and receipts, automated categorisation, live budget tracking, real-time reconciliation, and accounting integration.
Payhawk’s customer base is a mix of scale-ups and corporates in 27 countries across Europe including A.T.U, Luxair, Flink, Viking Life and Wagestream.
In 2021, Payhawk introduced 3 per cent cashback on all payments, new enterprise features, free bill payments, and support for Apple Pay and Google Pay in 30 countries. And since its Series A round in April 2021, the company’s transaction volume through the platform has increased by 663 per cent and continues to grow at more than 45 per cent month-on-month in October.
Capital utilisation
The proceeds from the round will allow Payhawk to open offices in the US, the Netherlands, Australia, and Singapore. The company will also expand its product offerings by introducing credit cards and allowing smarter and cheaper cross-border transactions besides its invoice management system.
The startup says these expansion and product build plans will run in tandem with growing the marketing and sales team in Payhawk’s key markets – the UK, Germany, Spain, and Benelux.
To further boost its enterprise focus, Payhawk has appointed Paul Albert as SVP Global Sales, who will lead direct sales, partnerships, and customer success.
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