The fashionable workplace employee is closely engaged with bills. From shopping for SaaS merchandise and buying group lunches to securing freelancers for outsourced work, staff want entry to buying energy on behalf of their firms regularly.
Unfortunately, providing that buying energy is fraught with problem. Companies wish to handle their money fastidiously to make sure audit compliance and forestall fraud, which regularly implies that fairly than empowering staff to spend what they want, they pressure them to work with byzantine “p-card” guidelines to make something occur.
Teampay needs to alter that calculus by giving each worker a stupendous platform to purchase the products, instruments, and companies they want whereas retaining them inside outlined firm coverage.
The New York City-based startup introduced immediately that it raised a $12 million collection A spherical from Jonathan Hsu of Tribe Capital . Existing traders Crosscut, Silicon Valley Bank, and Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures additionally participated.
When I chatted with the corporate final yr, founder and CEO Andrew Hoag had simply locked in a $four million seed spherical and had not too long ago launched the platform. Since then, “We brought in our first sales reps, brought in one marketing hire, and we’re growing by double digit percentages, month-over-month in 2018,” Hoag mentioned.
He famous that Teampay has been fastidiously refining its pitch to clients. “Even comparing 2018 to 2019, I think we spend — no pun intended — a lot more time working with our customers on solutions, as opposed to talking now about the pain points, because they’re hyper aware of those pain points,” he mentioned.
What Teampay found is that whereas the ache level for organizations is the precise buy of a selected good or service, what firms are actually in search of is healthier instruments to handle bills throughout the board, or what Hoag calls “distributed spend management.”
That contains the challenges of managing spend even exterior of an organization’s partitions. With an increasing number of companies hiring freelancers as of late, it may be difficult to supply contingent employees entry to spending energy with out onerous bureaucratic methods that in the end value extra in misplaced wage and productiveness than financial savings in value administration.
Teampay founder and CEO Andrew Hoag. Photo through Teampay.
In addition to hiring in gross sales and engineering, Teampay has additionally employed a number of senior executives over the previous yr. Peter Nesbitt joined as VP of Finance, and was previously VP of Finance at Unified and director of finance at Bitly. Nicole Lindenbaum joined as VP of Marketing from PeopleDoc and Yodle, whereas Matt Petcoff joined as head of gross sales from Inturn and Movable Ink.
Spend administration has heated up acutely up to now yr, with Brex reaching unicorn standing with its now ubiquitous playing cards focusing on startups and Stripe saying its Stripe Corporate Card alongside the same vein.
Hoag emphasised that Teampay targets a special drawback in a number of methods. First, “We don’t require a customer to switch their card program in order to be able to use Teampay,” he defined. Instead, Teampay acts as a form of collaboration software program layer on high of the prevailing card infrastructure that an organization has to higher handle spend throughout the group.
Second, Teampay doesn’t deal with startups a lot as bigger enterprises the place the wants round spend are completely different and extra sophisticated. “Most of our customers are fairly large, and they have strong balance sheets,” Hoag mentioned. “And so they’re not looking to optimize for working capital, they don’t have a problem of getting access to credit, they have a problem about controlling credit.”
The firm famous that it has clients like Wistia, Chime, Mixpanel, and RiskIQ utilizing the platform.
Hoag’s aim for the brand new spherical of capital is to proceed to develop Teampay’s partnerships and integrations (as an illustration, increasing Teampay to work in live performance with IT ticketing methods to make software program and…
