Xpenditure has raised USD5.7 million in Series A financing. Xpenditure offers expense management solutions for enterprise and SME customers in 40 countries, and integrates with all major online accounting platforms.
Xpenditure aims to become the market leader in expense management.
The USD5.7 million Series A round was led by various private investors, including existing shareholder Bart Swanson (Summly, Badoo, Amazon). Previous investors also include Lorenz Bogaert and Toon Coppens (Netlog, Twoo – sold to IAC), and Jonas Dhaenens (Combell).
The round, one of the largest Series A by a Belgian enterprise SaaS to date, confirms expense management as one of the hottest SaaS categories of the moment.
Bart Swanson, Xpenditure investor and Advisor to the Board, says: “I’ve always hated doing expenses. Helping eliminate expense report hassles is a joy. Xpenditure’s innovative solution presents a rare market opportunity. Every professional – whether employee, business owner or freelancer – is a potential user. It’s not often that you find a specific business pain that is so universally shared and hated. By every metric, this is a huge market. Xpenditure will save companies and individuals tons of time and money – and Xpenditure is already making great inroads.”
According to market research, both employees and management consider expense management a slow process that is error-prone. Some 70 per cent of expense management is still done using spreadsheets and paper.
While some expense management solutions mimic the traditional monthly expense report in a digital form, Xpenditure built a new process around its intuitive mobile and desktop app.
The app allows users to scan paper or e-receipts in realtime with their smartphone and submit them immediately. Expense management is thus transformed from a batch process into a stream, eliminating the frustrating monthly ritual of collecting, tallying and submitting expenses. For the accounting department, it removes the unpredictable batch of paper receipts that arrive in lumps and then need to be processed within a short time.
One of the key advantages of Xpenditure is its robust and scalable expense management process, making it appealing to solo entrepreneurs, growth companies as well as enterprise CFOs seeking to reduce the expense management burden across a large organisation.
Wim Derkinderen, co-founder and Executive Chairman Xpenditure, says: “The one thing we keep hearing is how much time and frustration we are saving everyone – not just the accounting department, but also individual users. Strong SaaS solutions replace obsolete manual processes with superior ones, rather than merely digitizing a broken process. Because we redesigned expense management from the ground up, even large enterprises can roll out our cost-effective solution in weeks, fully integrated with their accounting and ERP system – rather than months or years.”
Xpenditure, with offices in Mechelen (Brussels, EU), New York, Sao Paolo (Brazil), the UK and Germany, has shown consistent double-digit, month-over-month growth in 2015. The company has customers in 40 countries through online signups and enterprise sales. Enterprise customers include Henkel, Pernod Ricard, Miele, Kone, while partnerships are in place with professional service companies (Deloitte), credit card companies (MasterCard) and financial institutions (e.g. Belfius Bank).
Xpenditure integrates with all major online accounting packages, including Xero, Sage One, E-conomic, Freshbooks, QuickBooks Online, Exact Online and FreeAgent as well as popular cloud storage solutions like Evernote and Dropbox. By the end of 2015, Xpenditure will be available in 15 languages.
Boris Bogaert (pictured), co-founder and CEO, says: “Since our commercial launch two years ago, we’ve spent time researching diverse legal frameworks in the European markets, and we’ve built scalable technology to address the full range of legal systems. With our ability to deploy new languages in as little as two weeks, this puts us in a unique position to expand into new markets fast. And we aim to fully exploit this early mover advantage in the European market.”
Bogaert was responsible for the commercial rollout of Ping and Eunet, early Belgian ISPs in the early ‘90s, both acquired by Belgacom. (BR: BELG) He moved on to Spacechecker/Punch Telematix, acquired by Trimble (NASDAQ: TRMB). In 2007, he joined Netlog – at the time the largest European social network – which was acquired by IACI group (NASDAQ: IACI).
