If you’ve followed corporate card and spend management startups in the U.S., you might be familiar with Brex and Ramp. Payhawk is also offering an all-in-one financial management solution for businesses but with a focus on European customers. And the company just raised a $112 million Series B round at a $570 million valuation.
Greenoaks is leading the round, with all existing investors participating once again, such as QED Investors and Earlybird Digital East.
Payhawk wants to replace several services that companies use to simplify their financial stack and make things work better together. Customers get their own account with a dedicated IBAN. They can connect this Payhawk account to their existing bank account to load and withdraw funds.
After that, you can use Payhawk for all things related to payment. Customers can issue virtual and physical cards for employees with set rules such as a team budget or an approval workflow. This way, employees don’t have to pay with their personal cards.
There are no conversion fees with transactions in EUR, GBP and USD. For other currencies, Payhawk charges a 1.99% exchange markup. The startup recently introduced 3% cash back on card payments with a cap at the Payhawk subscription price.
Payhawk also handles invoice collection so that clients can reconcile expenses from their employees. The startup has also built several integrations with ERP systems — you can automatically sync expenses and receipts with traditional accounting software.
You can also use your Payhawk balance to reimburse employees in case they had to use cash. If your bank charges fees on outgoing bank transfers, you can also use Payhawk to pay bills without paying any transfer fee. It’s also a way to keep everything in the same interface.
“Managing company cards, especially reports, bill payments and invoices is currently a disconnected experience bridged by finance teams through a lot of manual work. We are building enterprise software running on global payments infrastructure that automates all spend processes. Our strong product background and engineering team allows us to move at breakneck speed,” co-founder and CEO Hristo Borisov said in a statement.
In Europe, Payhawk competes with Spendesk, Pleo, Revolut Business and others. As you can see, there are quite a lot of players in this space, meaning that there’s a big market opportunity.
Payhawk currently has offices in London, Sofia, Berlin and Barcelona. It has customers across 27 European countries but most of them are in the U.K., Germany, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Since the company’s Series A round earlier this year, Payhawk saw a huge increase of 663% in transaction volume. As the company generates revenue on interchange fees, that metric tells you that the company’s revenue is also growing rapidly.
Up next, the company plans to open offices in the U.S., the Netherlands, Australia and Singapore. It should give you an idea of the company’s upcoming market expansions. In addition to cards that are directly tied to your Payhawk balance, the company is also working on credit cards as well as better cross-border transactions.
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