Tipalti has taken the opportunity to raise another $30 million in funding. The Series C round was led by Zeev Ventures. This is the investment vehicle of Oren Zeev, Founding Partner of Zeev Ventures and Chairman and Co-founder of Tipalti.
It is slightly unusual for a founders own investment vehicle to participate in a later funding round, especially as the lead investor. However it does show that Zeev is fully behind the firm. He commented: “It was a relatively easy decision to continue investing in Tipalti. It is extremely rare to have the opportunity to invest in a category leader. Tipalti is really changing the way B2B payments are being done, helping companies manage their cross-border payment, supplier, and compliance operations. When you talk to Tipalti’s clients like Amazon, GoDaddy, Indeed, Roku, and Twitter, or read the company’s 5-star reviews, the consensus is that businesses around the globe love using Tipalti to drive their AP transformation and support their growth.”
In fact Zeev has invested in the company before, in each of the earlier rounds. The funds came from two of Zeev Ventures funds as well as some of the other original investors. Though Tipalti would not be drawn on whom. Thirty per cent of the investment came from new funds.
ET asked Chen Amit, CEO Tipalti abouts the Zeev investment, he said: ”Oren’s previous investments into Tipalti were personal. This was an opportunity for Zeev Ventures to make its first investment into Tipalti, which is a great investment opportunity for the fund. The company had multiple offers from other, very reputable investors, and chose Zeev Ventures.”
Why does Tipalti need investment?
Tipalti offers accounts payable software and has enjoyed 200% year over year growth. Key to its success is the 98% customer satisfaction rating it has achieved. It deals with more than $4 billion remittances annually and has helped companies such as GoDaddy, Nikon and Go Pro.
Jonathan Wu, COO and Co-Founder – Touch of Modern commented: “Before discovering Tipalti we were basically doing our accounts payable by hand. Which is what most people in retail or actually in general business do too. One of the biggest advantages to adopting Tipalti very early on was that we have been able to scale really efficiently without really thinking about the problems and bottlenecks in accounts payable.”
So how will Tipalti use the new funds. Amit answered: “Our #1 company value is Commitment to Customer Success and we really want to focus funds on doubling down on that customer experience that brought us to where we are today. We have had a near perfect customer satisfaction and retention rate throughout our history and it’s a priority to maintain that performance, as this in turn will drive business growth. To do this, we will expand our R&D team significantly to accelerate our innovation rate, while building out our customer success and account management teams to maintain our near perfect customer satisfaction and retention rate. Finally, we will certainly be investing in scaling out the customer base and expanding our partner ecosystem.”
So what does the future hold? Zeev believes there is a huge opportunity. He commented: “Tipalti’s success comes from its vision and team, recognizing how financial technology can be used to solve what was once an unsolvable scalability and compliance issue. It is quite clear that it’s time for the payables operation to take advantage of automation. Organizations should not be running finance operations manually, but rather automate this workflow to reduce short and long-term risk and costs and ultimately free resources for high value initiatives. Tipalti is extremely well positioned to take advantage of this movement. Tipalti has only scratched the surface of what we believe is a $90B global market.”
What does it mean
This is a significant investment in Tipalti. It is not, however, disproportionate to its current size. What will be interesting is to see how the money is investment and how the product is moved forward. Recent product announcements include new purchase order matching functionality. Tipalti may also look to increase the number of integrations with ERP vendors. It currently integrates to Oracle, Oracle NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics, Sage Intacct. However, there are no integrations to other Sage Products, Workday, SAP or SMB software such as Quickbooks or Xero.
It should also look to extend its partner network. It will also be interesting to see whether it extends its reach globally. Although Amit did not mention global expansion as part of its aims. It is now set to continue its success for the next year, growing both functionality and customers.
