fintech startup donationsk announces that it has applied for an extension of its Series C round. Tiger Global is investing $114 million (€100 million) in the startup. Following today’s funding round, the company says it has a valuation of more than $1.14 billion.
In other words, Spendesk is a new unicorn in the French tech ecosystem. News of the funding has accelerated in France in recent months. In January alone, five startups announced that they had crossed the unicorn status threshold – PayFit, anchor store, qonto, exotic and donationsk.
Back Market, an e-commerce marketplace focused on refurbished smartphones and electronics, also has raised a mega round and reached a valuation of 5.7 billion US dollars.
Let’s return to Spendesk. The startup offers an all-in-one platform for corporate spend management for medium-sized companies in Europe. Originally focused on virtual cards for online payments, the company has expanded its product offering to handle everything related to corporate spending.
Spendesk customers can order physical cards for employees, team members can use the platform to pay outstanding bills, submit expense reports, manage budgets and generate expense reports. By offering everything in a single service, Spendesk aims to simplify accounting and approvals in general so money can move more freely.
The startup defines its platform as a “7-in-1 spend management solution,” meaning Spendesk is no longer just a product you can use to order debit cards for your employees.
“We had that goal from the start — we really want to become that platform, that operational system for managing your spend,” co-founder and CEO Rodolphe Ardant told me. “When we started working on the product, we looked at each use case and developed the right workflow for it.”
In particular, Spendesk helps you to formalize your internal processes. You can define team budgets, set up complicated approval workflows for expensive payments, and automate some tedious tasks like B. the VAT statement.
“We are targeting medium-sized customers. These are customers with 50 to 1,000 employees. We have a few customers that are larger and a few customers that are smaller,” Ardant said.
And the company currently has 3,500 customers – about half of them are based in France, while other customers are mainly based in Germany and UK customers spent €3 billion through Spendesk in 2021 alone.
With its central positioning in the financial stack, Spendesk has to work perfectly with other financial instruments – banks on the one hand and ERP products on the other.
The startup currently supports many of the popular accounting tools used by European companies such as B. Xero and Datev. Spendesk customers can also export batches of transactions and import them into Sage, Cegid and other accounting software solutions.
Spendesk is also working on automating the integrations with your bank accounts, which could be especially useful for businesses with multiple bank accounts. For example, you could imagine setting up a rule that automatically triggers a transfer between your German bank account and your Spendesk account when you want to pay a German provider.
Photo credit: donationsk
Expense Management in Europe
Spendesk is not the only spend management solution in Europe. There are some competitors, such as Pleothat recently reached a valuation of 4.7 billion US dollars, and money – another well-financed competitor like him Raised $180 million last year.
Also in the USA like companies Brexit and ramp have achieved sky-high ratings. And yet Spendesk doesn’t think it has the same positioning as American startups.
“In the American market, you shouldn’t call it the spend management industry—it’s the corporate card industry. Players like Brex and Ramp are positioning themselves as a payment method,” Rodolphe Ardant, Spendesk co-founder and CEO, told me. “Europe’s corporate culture is one of should – not have. We don’t offer payment methods, we offer a process.”
It’s a small difference in product positioning, so it will be interesting to see if a European spend management start-up can successfully enter the US and vice versa.
In terms of the business model, Spendesk sees itself as a software-as-a-service company with recurring subscriptions. The startup declined to give hard numbers about its earnings. Its CEO just said that Spendesk’s revenue is “more than doubling every year.”
With today’s funding round, Spendesk plans to triple the size of its team over the next two years. The company plans to employ 1,000 people by the end of 2023.
