‘Hyper Growth’ and Global Demand For Spend Management Luring Investors to B2B

PayEm announced Wednesday (Sept. 1) that it has raised $27 million in funding that it plans to use to further grow its global spend management and procurement platform.

The announcement comes after PayEm said it experienced “hyper-growth” in the second quarter, delivering a four-fold increase in its portfolio due to global companies needing an easier way to handle company spend.

With the new funding, the company will expand its product offering, add new features, extend its global reach and double its headcount by the end of 2021, up from 40 employees. PayEm is targeting a staffing increase to over 200 employees by the end of 2022.

“The funding will be invested in growth,” PayEm CEO and Co-Founder Itamar Jobani told PYMNTS in an email. “Our mission is to create a holistic, end-to-end finance operating system.”

A Solution for Today’s Complexities

PayEm’s global spend and procurement platform is specifically designed for global small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) as it automates finance processes from request to reconciliation and streamlines reimbursement, procurement, accounts payable (AP) automation and credit card processes into one centralized platform that also delivers cross-border capabilities.

The need for such a platform has been driven by a paradigm shift that has created additional complexities for finance teams, the company explained. It used to be that major spend decisions were made by procurement and finance teams. Now, however, decision-making with regard to vendors, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platforms and more are delegated to teams throughout the organization.

An Automated, Centralized Platform

PayEm’s platform offers solutions. By automating finance processes from request to reconciliation, it gives individuals and teams within global organizations the ability to manage non-payroll spend as needed while safeguarding budget, automating manual accounting tasks and allowing finance teams to remain agile and in control.

“On the employee side, if someone needs to buy something, whether it’s a travel expense or a SaaS subscription, all they have to do is submit a request,” Jobani explained.

The system sends the request through a pre-set approval process and, when approved, issues a card with a set budget. The employee receives a physical or virtual card and securely purchases what was requested.

“The beauty of PayEm is that once a transaction occurs, the finance team knows the full accounting context of each transaction, so reconciliation occurs in an automated manner,” Jobani said. “From an accounting perspective, the team no longer has to sift through transactions manually; most are already reconciled.”

By streamlining reimbursement, procurement, AP automation and credit card processes into one centralized platform, PayEm’s platform allows every subsidiary to have financial and accounting autonomy while enabling holistic processes at the global level. It puts an end to fragmented workflow and manual tasks.

CFOs Want Spend Management Info

Outdated spend management tools can be a source of friction in payment processes. A total of 35% of chief financial officers (CFOs) surveyed said a lack of awareness of digital technologies and their potential usefulness is holding them back from innovating their budgeting, cash management or other business processes.

Read more: Why Virtual-First Firms Need Transparent, Digital Spend Management Controls

The PayEm platform’s cross-border capabilities enable finance teams to use the platform to send funds to over 200 territories in 130 different currencies with one click.

“Another benefit of PayEm, if we’re talking about global companies, is that instead of having the finance team logging into many different banking providers for each subsidiary, they now have one solution for all territories,” Jobani said.

Reasons for Growth

PayEm connects to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and is built to support every type of customization. The platform instantly pulls the relevant information, including company’s employees, organization structure, budget items, vendors, chart of accounts and custom fields.

“Many of our customers are astonished when they learn it only take 30 minutes to sync PayEm to their existing accounting systems,” Jobani said. “Our customer success team guides them through the process, and it’s plug-and-play from there.”

When the funding was announced, Yair Cassuto, partner at Pitango First, said PayEm’s market acceptance was apparent with every introduction it made before and after his firm’s investment.

“We were astonished by the pace of adoption of PayEm’s solution,” Cassuto said.

Lior Litwak, managing partner at Glilot Capital and head of Glilot+, added: “PayEm’s holistic platform has seen tremendous growth in such a short time precisely because it solves a truly fundamental problem for employees, managers and financial officers alike — the ongoing fragmentation in corporate financial tools.”