Co-founder and CMO, Yokoy
Big news! Yokoy – our all-in-one global spend management platform has raised $26 million in Series A funding in a round led by US investor Left Lane Capital, with participation from prominent European investor, Balderton Capital.
Founded in Switzerland in 2019 by experienced business professionals and scientists, Yokoy’s mission is to finally rid the corporate spending world of the legacy processes that have plagued it for decades, resulting in companies spending an average of $60 for every single expense that moves through their existing manual, and outdated workflows.
The platform, which is powered by machine learning developed in Yokoy’s own cutting-edge AI research lab, automates spend management with artificial intelligence. It combines expense management, supplier invoice management and corporate credit cards into one single intuitive tool, underpinned by the most up-to-date security and stability.
Midsize to enterprise companies can configure and build their own, unique process flows – automating as many or as few steps as they want – and automatically integrate Yokoy with all major third-party tools. Plus, because the platform is self-learning, it is constantly monitoring individual workflows and processes to make them more efficient, scalable and impactful over time.
Yokoy is able to bring the cost of spending management down by $1,000 per employee, per year. To put this into perspective, a midsize company could realistically save $1 million a year, while getting more satisfied employees, analytics and big data opportunities and control over all spend activities with Yokoy.
It’s this impact – fuelled by Yokoy’s dedication to building the very best AI in its in-house research lab; its commitment to security; its flexibility; and its global reach that has seen the firm become the trusted spend management platform for more than 400 leading midsize and enterprise customers worldwide including DPD Group, Stadler Rail, Russia’s Sberbank, the Swiss bank Swissquote.
Since its launch two years ago, Yokoy has grown to more than 400 customers, more than 80,000 users, five global offices, and almost 100 employees.
Dr. Devis Lussi, Co-Founder & CTO said: “With Yokoy we’re building a highly intelligent, highly secure, and highly customisable global spend management platform that empowers our customers to take control of their vast corporate spending processes and fine tune their workflows. We’re helping them to cut costs, save time and bring clarity to their global operations in a way that fits their ambitions. It’s this that we believe will see us becoming the leading spend management platform in the world.”
Christoph Kühne, Head of Group Finance On AG “Building and managing our Finance processes in a global growth setup is a challenging endeavor which requires reliable and stable end-to-end integrations in the IT realm, as well as compliance with different country-specific regulations for tax and accounting topics. Yokoy is that solution, providing us with full, two-way integration between their Spend Management solution and our ERP system landscape, significantly reducing the time and effort spent working on cross-tool processes while increasing the turnaround time. Process automation amplifies these efficiency gains and the comprehensive and knowledgeable support and advice from the Solutions Team of Yokoy during the onboarding phase was outstanding.”
The wider spend management industry
The spend management tool industry is worth more than $200bn globally, and has grown 11% year-on-year. At the same time, the processing of a single expense report is estimated to cost a company $58 each time, while processing a single invoice is estimated to cost between $12 and $32. This is before the loss of unreclaimed VAT, frustration and the risk of false or fraudulent expenses/invoices, and card processing fees are taken into account.
The biggest cost drivers to companies when it comes to spend management are manual work, transaction fees and errors. These costs can be cut by 50% if resource intensive processes are automated, and cut by more than 90% when AI is combined with automated processing and real-time API integrations, as is the case with Yokoy.
By constantly developing the machine learning algorithms in its in-house research lab, headed up by CTO Dr Devis Lussi, formerly of ETH & CERN, Yokoy harnesses data in an anonymised way to constantly improve processes based on each company’s needs. This makes the platform agile and responsive to regulatory and market changes that are specific to each industry, country and firm it works with.
This flexible approach also means the product is both easy-to-use and highly scalable, allowing companies to automate what they want, while still having oversight into the small, yet crucial, number of outliers and anomalies. Plus, by hiring senior security experts from Swiss banks, Yokoy ensures the security of each customer’s data through the development, and constant deployment, of the most up-to-date, robust security systems.
Yokoy will look to use the new $26 million funding round to expand deeper into the US, Europe and more regions across the globe. The funding will also be used to further enhance the technologies underpinning the platform to stay at the cutting-edge of its AI, automation and security systems.
Vinny Pujji, Managing Partner at Left Lane Capital said: “Corporate spend management has been a slow-moving category with clunky solutions; but for good reason, given the unique regulatory, product, and security requirements. Yokoy’s easy-to-use but robust spend management suite is enabled by AI and offers flexibility, scale, and security to customers, from startup to enterprise. We are thrilled to partner with such a passionate and empathetic team, led by Philippe.”
