Airbase, the only all-in-one platform for spend management, today announced it has raised $23.5 million in Series A extension funding led by new investor Bain Capital Ventures. Returning investors First Round Capital and BoxGroup also participated in the round, as well as Webb Investment Network, an early-stage fund run by former Liveops CEO Maynard Webb; Frederic Kerrest, Executive Vice Chairman, COO, and co-founder of Okta; and Ron Gill, former CFO of NetSuite. Airbase will use the capital to increase the size of its team, invest in product development, and open a New York City office. To date, Airbase has raised $30.8 million in venture capital financing.
“Companies see the value in streamlining spend management in one place, so Airbase is adding customers quickly. When trusted investors approached us with the possibility of raising more funding, we decided to accelerate our plans and invest significantly in growth,” said Thejo Kote, founder and CEO of Airbase. “We’re thrilled to announce support from Bain Capital Ventures, welcoming to our board Partner Ajay Agarwal, who brings deep expertise in the enterprise software and fintech domains.”
Airbase is a modern spend management platform that saves companies time and money by enabling them to manage every aspect of corporate spending. With Airbase, finance and accounting teams can control expense requests and approvals, perform invoice processing, make bill payments, and reconcile all accounting on one platform. Airbase replaces the usual spend management set-up of multiple siloed solutions, such as one platform for pre-approvals, one for filing expenses, one for paying bills, and another for credit cards, and enables companies to track the flow of every dollar from their bank accounts into the general ledger in real time. Airbase is fully integrated with accounting platforms Oracle NetSuite, QuickBooks Online, Xero, and Sage Intacct. Fast-growing companies such as Front, Gusto, Doximity, Segment, Tatcha, and Getaround are already using Airbase to manage their spending.
“Airbase brings together finance workflows typically held in disparate software and payment systems into one seamless experience and their visionary product is being rapidly adopted by high-growth companies,” said Agarwal from Bain Capital Ventures. “We invested in Airbase because their technology solves a real-world problem, but also because we believe strongly in CEO and Founder Thejo Kote, who has already successfully built and exited one software company, and in the excellent team he has hired.”
Kote started Airbase to solve a pressing problem: managing spending at fast-growing companies. As he himself was building his former company, Automatic, from startup through a $115-million acquisition, Kote was frustrated with how complicated it was to manage non-payroll spending on everything from software subscriptions, to supplies, employee travel, and vendor payments. In a typical company, employees requesting expenses use a tool like email, Slack, or Google Forms to ask for approval and then put approved charges on a company or personal credit card. Employees then use a tool like Expensify to record all receipts and wait several weeks to get reimbursed through ACH transfer. Vendor invoices and payments are handled separately through a PO process or Bill.com. At the end of the month, the accounts payable team reconciles all charges in accounting software. Airbase eliminates all these separate tools and enables companies to manage all aspects of spending in one workflow.
Startups in particular are laser-focused on controlling spending to reach profitability. For example, Front, provider of a popular email collaboration tool that was named a Next-Billion-Dollar Startup by Forbes and now has over 5,500 customers, is using Airbase to keep track of all its corporate spend.
“As a fast-growing company that has raised over $138 million in funding and is adding customers every week, it’s critical to put spending controls in place to ensure we stay lean, efficient, and focused on profitability,” said Jenny Decker, CFO of Front. “Airbase is an employee-friendly platform that has helped us implement spending controls without heavy bureaucracy. Consolidating all our payments into one system lets our accounts team automate all expense, payment, and accounting tasks so we can ensure every penny spent is helping Front grow and succeed.”
With Airbase, companies no longer waste time tracking down how, why, when, and where money is spent each month. Airbase allows finance and accounting teams to move past the cycle of manual reconciliation, data entry, and follow-ups to instead focus on growing their companies.
About Airbase
Airbase is the first all-in-one spend management platform built for today’s growing companies. Airbase combines expense approvals, physical and virtual cards, bill payments, reporting, and accounting automation into a single platform that employees love using. Fast-growing companies including Front, Gusto, Doximity, Segment, and Getaround use Airbase to get full control and visibility into their spending, automate accounting processes, and make purchasing painless for employees.
About Bain Capital Ventures
Bain Capital Ventures partners with disruptive founders to accelerate their ideas to market. The firm invests from seed to growth in startups driving transformation across industries, from SaaS, infrastructure software and security to fintech and healthcare to commerce and consumer tech. The firm has helped launch and commercialize more than 240 companies, including DocuSign, Jet.com, Kiva Systems, Lime, LinkedIn, Rapid7, Redis Labs, Rent the Runway, Rubrik, SendGrid and SurveyMonkey. Bain Capital Ventures has $5.2 billion in assets under management with offices in San Francisco, New York, Boston, and Palo Alto. Follow the firm via LinkedIn and Twitter.
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