INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
building new things and helping with mundane paperwork and other back-office tasks
Today, one of the faster-growing startups in the latter category is announcing a round of funding as it continues on its own path: AppZen,
which builds AI-powered tools to automate functions within the finance department, has raised another $50 million in funding led by Coatue
Management, with previous investors Redpoint Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participating.We understand from sources that
For some context, the company in October of last year raised a $35 million round led by Lightspeed that put it at a post-money valuation of
platform and its capabilities, CEO Anant Kale said in an interview (Kale co-founded the company with Kunal Verma, who is its CTO).To date,
that person has undertaken (along with many other data points) to see if the charges match up; as well as making sure the expenses are
compliant with company policies and raising flags when they are not.This is the product that has won the company a ton of business from huge
businesses, which now number 1,500 (another point of comparison: this is more than double the 650 customers it had last October)
AppZen users include Amazon, Nvidia, Salesforce, three of the top 10 banks in the U.S., four of the top 10 media companies, three of the top
10 pharmaceutical manufacturers, two of the top five aerospace companies, a number of other software providers and Verizon (which happens to
own us).Going forward, while the company continues to see a lot of traction with its existing products in auditing how a company pays out
money, the plan will be to build that out to other functions of the finance department, covering, for example, other areas where the finance
those applying automation and AI to auditing expenses but those coming from other angles like robotic process automation (RPA) that are
looking to expand from their computer-vision-based tasks into a deeper set of tools addressing other back-office needs
that AppZen is helping to be used in a better way by their clients.For now, though, AppZen is growing fast, and has secured a formidable
of their spend at scale and with the team they have, all before payments go out the door
director for Coatue Management, in a statement
clear and rapid execution in the market
In this case, automating more repetitive tasks and calculations that had been the domain of humans doubtless must reduce operational costs
in an organization, and generally speed up the process, but AI is not always perfect, and sometimes replacing people with those systems
learning process, words that apply not just to the companies building these services, but those organizations buying them, too.
