- Airbase, an all-in-one platform for spend management, announced it raised $23.5 million in Series A extension funding led by new investor Bain Capital Ventures
Airbase, an all-in-one platform for spend management, announced it raised $23.5 million in Series A extension funding led by new investor Bain Capital Ventures. And existing investors First Round Capital and BoxGroup also participated in the round along with Webb Investment Network. Webb Investment Network is an early-stage fund run by former Liveops CEO Maynard Webb, EVP and COO and Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest, and former NetSuite CFO Ron Gill.
With this round of funding, Airbase plans to increase the size of its team, invest in product development, and open a new office in New York. Including this round of funding, Airbase has raised a total of $30.8 million.
What does Airbase do? Airbase is a modern spend management platform that saves companies time and money by helping them manage every aspect of corporate spending. Using Airbase, finance and accounting teams are able to 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 like one platform for pre-approvals, one for filing expenses, one for paying bills, and another for credit cards. Plus it enables companies to track the flow of every dollar from their bank accounts into the general ledger in real-time.
And Airbase can be fully integrated with accounting platforms like Oracle NetSuite, QuickBooks Online, Xero, and Sage Intacct. And companies like Front, Gusto, Doximity, Segment, Tatcha, and Getaround are tapping into Airbase to manage their spending.
Thejo Kote, founder and CEO of Airbase, launched the company to solve the problem of out-of-control spending at fast-growing companies. While Kote was building his former company Automatic from a startup to a $115 million acquisition, Kote was frustrated by how challenging it was to manage non-payroll spending on items like software subscriptions, employee travel, vendor payments, and supplies.
For 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.
Then employees use a tool like Expensify to record all receipts and wait several weeks to get reimbursed through ACH transfer. And vendor invoices and payments are handled separately through a PO process or Bill.com. Then at the end of the month, the accounts payable team reconciles all charges in accounting software. Airbase is able to eliminate all these separate tools and enables companies to manage all aspects of spending in one workflow.
Using Airbase, companies no longer waste time tracking down how, why, when, and where money is spent every month. And Airbase allows finance and accounting teams to move past the cycle of manual reconciliation, data entry, and follow-ups to focus on growing their companies.
Key Quotes:
“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. 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.”
-Thejo Kote, founder and CEO of Airbase
“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. 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.”
-Ajay Agarwal, partner at Bain Capital Ventures
“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. 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.”
-Jenny Decker, CFO at Front
