Payhawk raises €3 million in seed funding
Joe McGrath | News
17 Mar 2020
Virtual corporate payments group Payhawk has successfully closed a €3 million seed funding round.
The majority of the fundraising was through fintech funding platform Earlybird, supported by additional backing by TinyVC and high profile individuals such as Mark Antipof, the former chief commercial officer at Visa and Sage’s chief strategy officer Keith Robinson.
Payhawk plans to use the cash to strengthen its presence in the German market, having opened an office in Berlin last year.
The company offers an “end to end” finance platform for businesses, including a virtual corporate card, invoice collection and reconciliation, and financial reporting solutions.
In many companies, expense management is still far too bureaucratic, non-transparent and full of paperwork,” Hristo Borisov, chief executive officer and founder of Payhawk, said.
“Many employees are forced to spend personal funds, manually track expenses with the legacy expense apps, write cumbersome reports and wait months to get reimbursed. Our payment solution addresses exactly this pain point.”
The company now has more than 1,000 users across 14 countries. It has built out from its original base in Sofia to expand operations across Europe. The latest fund raising was also backed by its existing angel investors and VC shop Eleven Ventures.
Roland Manger, co-founder and partner at Earlybird, said Payhawk has managed to combine the “best of what exists today” in its commercial solution, adding that the business has exciting potential for the future.
He said: “Neobanks paved the way for great customer experience in payments. AI and machine learning already outperform manual data entry of invoices and cloud-based expense apps have existed for more than a decade.
“We were impressed with the strong product DNA of the founding team and their relentless focus on customer experience.”
The company will be hosting a live demonstration of its paperless company card with several industry finance directors in a live web stream on 1 April 2020. Interested parties can register for more details here.
