AppZen secures $50 million Series C funding to transform enterprise finance and fight expense reporting fraud with AI

AppZen, a fintech that delivers the world’s leading AI platform for modern finance teams for global enterprises, has raised $50 million in Series C funding to accelerate its mission to become the leading artificial intelligence (AI) platform for CFOs and their teams to reduce spend, comply with policy and streamline process.

The round, which was led by Coatue Management. Existing investors Redpoint Ventures, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated in the round, brings the company’s total investment to more than $100 million.

Founded in 2012, AppZen automates manual processes, uncovers problems, and optimizes decision making for more than 1,500 global enterprises including Airbus, Amazon, Novartis, and Salesforce. Its AI platform combines patented computer vision, deep learning and semantic analysis with intelligence from thousands of online sources to understand financial transactions in business context and make decisions before those transactions happen.

Starting with expenses and payables, AppZen’s vision is to assist decision making across a large swath of finance, including spend, revenue, cash, treasury, and beyond. The company will 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.

Starting with business spend, we automate manual process, uncover problems, and optimize decision making for enterprises around the globe, including one-fourth of the Fortune 500. Our platform combines patented deep learning, computer vision, and semantic analysis with intelligence from thousands of online data sources to understand financial transactions in business context and make decisions before those transactions happen. AppZen is a must-have for CFOs and their teams to reduce spend, comply with policy, and streamline process.

AppZen is the world’s largest AI platform for modern finance teams. The startup reached a milestone when it crosses the $50 billion threshold of spend audited in real-time, saving enterprises millions in errors, waste, and fraud

“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,” said Thomas Laffont, Senior Managing Director for Coatue Management. “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.”

“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 Anant Kale, Co-Founder and CEO of AppZen. “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.”

Since releasing its platform in 2016, over 1,500 enterprises have standardized on AppZen, including four of the top five banks, four of the top ten media companies, three of the top ten pharmaceutical manufacturers, two of the top five aerospace companies, and five of the top ten software providers. The company quintupled its revenue in 2018 and expanded to over 200 employees. It will increase its workforce by 146 percent by the end of the year, as well as expand its go-to-market efforts globally.