Swiss FinTech startup Expense Robot raises $1.79M seed round to automate expense and business credit card processing using AI

Even with available technologies out there, the current expense processing is still inefficient and cumbersome. Many companies still rely on a combination of hybrid or manual way to process their expenses. Experiencing this problem first hand, the founders of Expense Robot, a Zürich, Switzerland-based fintech startup that uses artificial intelligence
to automate your expense, set out to solve this problem once and for all.

Today, Expense Robot announced raised $1.79 million (CHF 1.7 million) in a seed round co-led by Swisscom Ventures and SIX Group to expand its mission. Expense Robot uses artificial intelligence to automate expense and business credit card processes from the picture of a receipt all the way to the compliance checks, the Finance booking, VAT input tax reclaim, archiving and reimbursement. This allows managers and the Finance team to focus on exceptions and outliers only. Max. 5 seconds of manual work per expense is their promise.

Experiencing the pain of manually preparing, tracking, checking, approving and processing expenses first-hand, the five co-founders set out to start an expense revolution. The goal was clear: maximum 5 seconds of manual work per expense and business credit card transaction and no shifting of work from the employee to the finance team.

Expense Robot said the manual work should also be limited to special cases that cannot be validated by the AI. A company with about 150 expenseor business credit card users can save an entire full-time position thanks to Expense Robot. After the successful prototyping- and testing phase of the initial cloud-based expense management service, Expense Robot went live with a first wave of customers in September 2019. Since then the team has already landed renowned global customers such as Swissquote, Kägi, Ameropa or SkyCell.

Just take a photo of a receipt or forward your invoice and Expense Robot will book it directly in your company’s ERP system.

Founded in 2019 by Thomas Inhelder, Lars Mangelsdorf, Melanie Gabriel, and Philippe Sahli, Expense Robot’s vision is to leverage Artificial Intelligence to fully automate all expense- and business credit card processes to save time and money, increase employee satisfaction, reduce complexity and ensure compliance. Unlike traditional digital solutions, the company’s technology simplifies the process for all expense management stakeholders – employees, managers and the finance team – all the way up to booking it into the ERP system. The flexibility of the technology further allows complex setups and thereby supports multi-legal entity, multi-currency and rank-specific policies.

“There are many exciting features we have in store for the upcoming months”, says Devis Lussi, Co-founder and CTO of Expense Robot, “in order to grow our team accordingly, we decided to do a seed round.” The seed round was co-led by Swisscom Ventures and SIX with participation from Angel investors like Gian Reto à Porta, Founder of Contovista and Myke Näf, Founder of Doodle.

“Having Swisscom Ventures and SIX as lead-investors is a strong signal of the market’s interest in our approach of digitizing the expense- and business credit card process end-to-end” says Philippe Sahli, Co-founder and CEO of Expense Robot, “our goal is to revolutionize business spending in general in order for our customers to focus on their daily business – imagine you pay something on behalf of your company and within seconds get reimbursed on your bank account while the correct entry with VAT is already in the financial system.”

“The experienced team behind Expense Robot convinced us that their platform can revolutionize the expense and business credit card processes in Swiss companies and abroad,” says Alexander Schlaepfer, investment partner at Swisscom Ventures, “we are excited to support Expense Robot’s further growth in this underserved market.”