Insight Partners leads $34M round in Spenmo
Spenmo has announced of raising a $34 million Series A led by Insight Partners, the New York-based investment firm known for its ScaleUp program.
The company says this is one of the largest Series A rounds ever raised by a Singaporean startup. It included participation from Lee Fixel’s investment firm Addition, Salesforce Ventures, Alpha JWC, Global Founders’ Capital, Broadhaven, Operator Partners and Commerce Ventures, along with angels like Plaid co-founder William Hockey, Grab Financial Group senior managing director Reuben Lai and head of Stripe Indonesia Ongki Kurniawan.
A Y Combinator alum, Spenmo was launched last year and has now raised a total of $36 million.
Founder and CEO Mohandass Kalaichelvan, said, “We stopped branding ourselves as expense management and focused on building a payables experience because we want to be at the heart of everything a company pays out. Right now companies don’t have that one source of truth. They use a tool for expense management, which is a silo, something else for vendor payments, something else for payroll and all these bank accounts they have to manage. We quickly realized that gave us an opportunity to bring all of these things into one place and reduce the silos that teams have to manage.”
Since one of Spenmo’s products is corporate cards, it is often compared to Brex or Aspire. But Kalaichelvan said the company has no desire to build a neobank. Instead, its aim is to help businesses manage the bank accounts they already have. Spenmo also doesn’t want to replace accounting software and, in fact, it integrates with solutions like Xero and QuickBooks.
About 80% of Spenmo’s customers perform cross-border payments and have multiple bank accounts across Southeast Asia. If a company has 500 invoices and bank accounts in Singapore and Indonesia, Spenmo helps its finance team manage which ones to send payments from.
Kalaichelvan added, “One thing we found about Southeast Asia is that cross-border is super important. Your workforce is remote, so very early on you have to send salaries abroad. Secondly, your supply chain is international as well, so there’s a lot of cross-border trades and services you want to account for.”
Spenmo can integrate with FX wallets in addition to bank accounts, so its clients can find the best rates.
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