Medius has announced its intention to acquire Expensya, a spend management solution with over 6,000 customers in over 100 countries. Founded in 2014 in Tunisia by Karim Jouini and Jihed Othmani, both ex-Microsoft engineers, the company is now headquartered in Paris, France. Expensya offers an expense management solution that automates the entire lifecycle with integrations with travel firms, Payment providers, Telecoms, ERP vendors and others. ERP integrations include Microsoft, Cegid, QuickBooks, SAP, Oracle, Workday and Sage.
The mobile-first Expensya platform is a natural addition to the Medius AP automation platform. While Medius focuses on Accounts Payable and is finance centric, the Expensya solution empowers employees to manage expenses autonomously whilst having oversight and control by the office of finance.
While terms were not disclosed, Medius believes this is one of the largest acquisitions within MENA this year. Expensya has raised $25.6 million in several funding rounds, the latest of which MAIF Avenir and Silicon Badia led a Series B round in May 2021.
The company has grown quickly since then, doubling its recurring revenue and growing its employee headcount to more than 200 (223 on LinkedIn). Its staff are mainly based in France and Tunisia, with a smaller presence in Germany and Belgium.
Jim Lucier, CEO of Medius, stated, “Expensya has developed a leading employee spend management solution in Europe, with innovative features and AI-powered innovation. Its founders, Karim and Jihed, and its leadership team share our ambition to transform the spend management category using the power of automation and AI. Together, we can offer CFOs solutions that can help them transform finance while empowering their teams. We are delighted to welcome the whole team to the Medius family.”
Product and Geographic benefits
There appears to be a synergy between Medius and Expensya at both product and geographic levels. The employee expense platform, which is both AI-enabled and mobile-first, complements the Medius AP automation platform with procurement, sourcing, contracts and supplier onboarding. Both platforms support payment providers, and bringing the solution together into a single platform will be an interesting challenge, if that is the intent. Expensya does not list an existing integration with Medius.
Medius will acquire more AI expertise and an engineering team with knowledge across several domains to further empower its own R&D team. The Swedish-based company will also gain a strong market foothold in France with a solution that is ready for the e-invoicing mandate, which in 2024 will require enterprises to issue e-invoices and by 2026, companies with more than 250 employees and an annual turnover of more than EUR 50M must do so.
Karim Jouini, CEO of Expensya, commented, “Mid-size organizations and their CFOs are clearly looking for one common platform to efficiently manage all their spend. By combining our employee spend management solution and payment cards, with Medius’s AP automation platform, we now cover the whole indirect spend of companies and can apply the power of AI to help finance teams to optimize cost and processes across the board. We look forward to writing the next chapter of our story with Jim and the rest of the Medius team.”
Medius will also hope to cross-sell to an impressive list of customers that the company has built up, especially in France, with firms such as Credit Agricole, Groupe BPCE and OVH Cloud.
Enterprise Times, what does this mean?
Kevin Permenter, Research Director for Financial Applications at IDC, commented, “Medius’s planned acquisition of Expensya will help financial leaders get a holistic view of their organization’s travel performance and financial position by enabling data from travel and expense activities to flow between the relevant finance functions. Businesses looking to thrive in the post-pandemic period will need advanced software tools like these to cope with new aspects of business travel.”
The acquisition is good news for customers of both Medius and Expensya if they want to consolidate employee and business expenses. However, the integration between the two solutions is critical, there is overlap between the two platforms, and it will be interesting to see how quickly the challenges are overcome.
There may be some quick wins with Medius and Expensya cross-selling into each other’s customer bases. There may be some good opportunities for enhancements to both solutions as well.
The opportunity is huge, though other AP automation and expenses companies may consider what could signal a shift in direction for AP Automation, as Medius looks to expand its application into an adjacent category. There are no details about the technology integration within the release nor indication of when this deal will complete.
