AppZen, a leading innovator in AI solutions for finance teams, recently announced a significant achievement, raising $180 million in growth funding. This substantial investment was spearheaded by Riverwood Capital, a prominent investment firm known for its dedicated focus on supporting the growth and scalability of technology companies. This new funding is set to accelerate AppZen’s mission to transform the way finance departments operate globally.
At its core, AppZen operates as an AI-native platform designed to bring autonomy to finance operations. The company leverages its unique ZenLM models and the sophisticated Mastermind AI Automation Platform to power its domain-trained AI Agents. These intelligent agents are capable of streamlining a wide array of end-to-end workflows, including managing travel and expense claims, accounts payable processes, and corporate card programs. This advanced technology not only transforms the daily operations of finance teams but also delivers tangible benefits.
Currently, more than 500 global enterprises, a group that includes over 65 of the Fortune 500 companies, depend on AppZen to automate their transaction processing. This reliance has resulted in over $2 billion in cost savings, enabling finance teams to reallocate up to two-thirds of their previously manual workload to more strategic and higher-value activities.
The Series D funding will enable AppZen to accelerate the broader adoption of agentic AI within large enterprises. This involves converting traditional standard operating procedures into adaptable, ready-to-use digital coworkers. This innovative approach empowers Chief Financial Officers and controllers to reduce over 50% of manual tasks, allowing them to scale their operations efficiently without the need for additional staff or external business process outsourcing.
In today’s complex business environment, enterprises are under increasing pressure to reduce costs, combat fraud, and maintain compliance across their intricate global operations. To address these growing challenges, many organizations are rapidly adopting artificial intelligence. Within these organizations, finance departments are particularly well-positioned for a significant transformation, moving beyond simple process automation to embracing autonomous decision-making through agent-based applications. AppZen is at the forefront of this transformation, providing agentic technology that helps finance teams eliminate manual reviews, minimize financial leakage from unnecessary spending, and ensure strict adherence to regulatory compliance.
AppZen’s advanced models are capable of deep semantic understanding across more than 40 languages and over 60 countries. Its robust platform is designed to support multi-entity and multi-currency operations, providing crucial assistance to some of the world’s most complex and heavily regulated enterprises. This capability enables these organizations to effectively mitigate fraud-related losses on an international scale, while simultaneously achieving significant efficiency gains and substantial cost savings.
A notable recent enhancement to AppZen’s offerings is the Mastermind AI Studio, which is the latest addition to its comprehensive Mastermind AI Automation Platform. This studio enables teams to rapidly modernize their existing standard operating procedures into sophisticated AI Agents. Remarkably, this can be achieved without requiring any coding expertise, dedicated IT resources, or specialized training. By leveraging this new platform, customers can seamlessly deploy AI Agents as digital workers, thereby reducing headcount costs, significantly speeding up processing times, and effectively meeting the demanding requirements of compliance.
New board members: Francisco Alvarez-Demalde and Alex Porto of Riverwood Capital have joined AppZen’s Board of Directors.
Support: J.P. Morgan acted as the sole placement agent to AppZen on the transaction.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’re thrilled to welcome Riverwood Capital as a partner in our mission to bring agentic AI to every finance team. Riverwood’s scale-up expertise and global network will help us accelerate the deployment of Mastermind AI Agents, so finance workflows can run on autopilot. With many of the world’s largest companies already on AppZen, demand for autonomous finance has never been higher. Together with Riverwood Capital, we’ll meet that customer need at scale and realize the full opportunity to reimagine how CFOs run finance.”
Anant Kale, Co-founder & CEO at AppZen
“AppZen is at the forefront of a massive shift in how global enterprises leverage AI and automation to drive efficiency and scale their operations. We are excited to partner with Anant and his exceptional team, whose vision and execution have made AppZen the category leader in autonomous finance for the enterprise and positioned the company to transform how businesses manage, audit, decide, and run expenses and payables.”
Francisco Alvarez-Demalde, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Riverwood Capital
“AppZen’s impact at Airbus was immediate. It significantly reduced the workload for our T&E analysts, allowing them to focus on more strategic activities. The platform helped us identify ambiguities in our T&E policies and eliminate inconsistent micro-policies throughout the company.”
Waqas Aman, Head of Financial Systems North America, Airbus
