Soldo Raises $180 M Funding For Its Business Expense Management Platform
- ByStartupStory | July 21, 2021
Soldo, a platform that provides prepaid company cards to the employees that are linked through to an automated expense management system, has closed $180 million in funding. The company has 26,000 customers currently, ranging from small medium-sized businesses, through to mid-market enterprises and up to large multinationals across 30 countries, with GetYourGuide, Gymshark, Bauli, Mercedes Benz, and Brooks Running among some of the more popular of them. Alongside that, by way of APIs, it also integrates with the popular accounting packages used by organizations today — NetSuite, QuickBooks, Zucchetti, and Xero, along with options to connect Soldo to more than 50 expense management platforms including Concur and Expensify.
The round, a Series C, is being led by Singapore’s Temasek, with Sunley House Capital, Advent International’s crossover fund, Citi Ventures, and previous backers Accel, Battery Ventures and Dawn Capital, also participating. Silicon Valley Bank also provided debt financing of an undisclosed amount. The company didn’t disclose valuation in a statement on this latest investment. Soldo said the round was oversubscribed on the back of strong growth for the company: spend volume on its platform has grown four-fold since its series B, a $61 million round in 2019. earlier this month, one of Soldo’s bigger competitors, Pleo, raised $150 million at a $1.7 billion valuation.
It is a massive market to play for: Europe’s addressable market for expense management runs at $170 billion, the company said. “Soldo’s vision is to manage the total spend across the breadth of a company, whether that be advertising, software subscriptions, travel and entertainment, vendor management or salaries across all payment methods. When we look at this way, expense management is only one of the many possible use cases and cards are only one of the many ways that a company might transfer money to suppliers,” Carlo Gualandri, CEO and founder of Soldo. He further added, “that we have a broader and more complete focus on managing all the possible needs of a company, way beyond travel and expenses. This is important because the value for the customer of using a spend management platform increases as a more significant share of company spend gets moved onto it.”
“The pandemic did almost completely wipe out travel and expenses as a use case of companies’ spend – given limited numbers of workers were travelling, or expensing lunches, for example, in lockdown,” said Gualandri. “It was quite shocking to see all of Europe switch off, country by country, in the first weeks of March of last year as the lockdown kept people in their homes. And with that, a significant part of our financial services revenues also disappeared because business travel is the most common and widespread use of corporate cards.” But then, two things happened, he continued
“Our experience in software and payments technology gives us deep insight and we are confident Soldo stands at the forefront of finance digitalization. The company operates in a large and fast-growing market, and we are thrilled to partner with its outstanding management team as they seek to build Europe’s leading pay and spend automation platform,” said Simon Lambert, a director at Sunley House, Advent International’s crossover fund, said in a statement.
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