- Finance AI platform AppZen recently announced that it raised $50 million in Series C funding led by Coatue Management
AppZen — the world’s leading AI platform for modern finance teams — announced it has raised $50 million in Series C funding led by Coatue Management. The existing investors Redpoint Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners also joined the round. And this brings the company’s total investment to more than $100 million.
With this round of funding, AppZen will accelerate its mission to become the leading artificial intelligence (AI) platform for CFOs and their teams to reduce spend, comply with the policy, and streamline the process.
AppZen is known for automating manual processes, uncovering problems, and optimizing decision making for more than 1,500 global enterprises including Airbus, Amazon, Novartis, and Salesforce. And its AI platform combines patented computer vision, deep learning, and semantic analysis with intelligence from thousands of online sources to understand financial transactions in the business context and make decisions before those transactions happen.
“Until now, true digital transformation in the CFO’s organization has been limited. Many finance processes require time-consuming analysis of documents like contracts, invoices, and receipts. Our AI technology learns from data, intelligence from thousands of internal and online sources, and the collective feedback from thousands of finance professionals. The result is the most effective spend auditing solution in the market today, powered by an AI platform that has been architected to solve the most critical business needs across all of finance,” said AppZen CEO and co-founder Anant Kale. “With this funding, we are able to focus on expanding our AI, engineering and product teams while maintaining our unique company culture, supporting the needs of our customers, and expanding our capabilities to continue to break ground on AI solutions for enterprise CFOs and their teams.”
Kale had founded AppZen with CTO Kunal Verma. Kale had previously worked at Fujitsu for more than 10 years. And Verma was a researcher at Accenture for nearly 7 years.
AppZen’s vision — which is starting with expenses and payables — is to assist decision making across a large swath of finance, including spending, revenue, cash, treasury, and beyond. And the company is going to focus on focus on pain points at the intersection of process automation, pre-transaction decision making, and the integration of intelligence from high volumes of internal and external data.
“AppZen allows enterprises to do something they’ve never been able to do – audit 100 percent of their spend at scale with the team they have, all before payments go out the door. AI lets CFOs dramatically reduce spend, comply with policy and streamline process as they pursue their digital transformation goals,” added Coatue Management Senior Managing Director Thomas Laffont. “When we met Anant, Kunal and the team, we were struck by their AI expertise and finance transformation vision, not to mention the company’s clear and rapid execution in the market.”
Some of AppZen’s recent company milestones include surpassing 1,500 customers and attracting nearly a third of Fortune 500 companies. And AppZen quintupled its revenue in 2018 and expanded to over 200 employees. The company is planning to increase its workforce by 146% by the end of the year and expand its go-to-market efforts globally.
This year, AppZen also expanded its AI platform to include the real-time audit of a company’s entire spend process, including procurement, supplier contracts, invoices, T&E expenses and credit cards — which builds on Expense Audit with the launch of Accounts Payable Audit and Contract Audit.
