This morning Stampli, a software platform that optimizes corporate invoice management, announced a $50 million Series C financing round, led by Insight Partners with participation from Signal Fire and Nextworld Capital.
The company launched in 2015 with the goal of simplifying the process of invoice management. Why is that needed? Services and software are purchased by employees of companies across a variety of departments. The resulting invoices then land in the finance department, a part of companies that can be a bit siloed. Finance is then left to determine a number of factors, like why something was purchased, whether it delivered, and if the invoice should it be paid at all.
Stampli turns each bill into a communications hub, connecting the folks in finance to other stakeholders on the purchase, including the vendor. Its system uses machine learning to recognize patterns around how the organization allocates cost, manage approval workflows, and what data can be extracted from invoices.
Stampli has been historically payment platform agnostic, meaning that its customers could use whatever payment method or provider they wanted. However, in early 2020, Stampli launched Direct Pay, its own payments product that solve some of the stickier problems for the accounting department. This fits into the general trend of seeing modern software companies bake a payments option into their services, adding a revenue stream to their books in the process.
Because Stampli’s core product focused on the context of individual transactions, it plays well with its payments product. For example, folks who pay through ACH (which comes at a low, flat cost) usually suffer from the fact that the payment method likes to group multiple transactions into a single sum, which removes context. That issue can make it a huge headache for accounts payable to reconcile individual purchases. But because Stampli already understands the context of individual transactions, it can fill in the blanks for accounting while still allowing them to use ACH for payments.
Of course, Stampli remains payments agnostic, letting organizations use whatever provider they’d like. Still, co-founder and CEO Eyal Feldman says that between 20 and 25 percent of Stampli’s customers use Direct Pay.
“There are all these payment providers that monetize on the payments themselves,” said Feldman. “We provide payments as a service to our customers to give them the easiest way to manage that part of the process. There is a revenue stream coming from Direct Pay but that isn’t the reason we do it. We want to turn payments into a commodity.”
Stampli will use the new funding to sprint into scaling, aiming to double the size of the business in the next year. Thus far, Stampli has about 1000 customers, and has managed $20 billion in transactions.
The latest round brings Stampli’s total amount of funding to $87 million, which has come from investors such as Signal Fire and UpWest.