Spain’s Captio Raises $1.1M For Business Spend Control

Corporate expense management platform Captio announced a $1.12 million funding round on Friday (Sept. 23).

The Spain-based startup secured the funding from Sabadell Venture Capital, along with Venturecap, Bankinter, Telegraph Hill Capital and Kibo Ventures, according to reports. The firm said it will use the latest funding round to help fuel expansion of its travel and spend management solutions.

According to CEO Joel Vicient, the company streamlines T&E into a paperless, streamlined solution, with automation helping to reduce the risk of fraud and errors. BBVA and Toyota are among some of its clients, reports noted.

Travel and expense management has been a popular target of investors, with Coupa, another T&E player, recently joining the Unicorn Club. Earlier this year, the company confirmed plans to go public with a goal of raising $75 million in an IPO.

One reason why T&E technology might be so popular is that employees are facing significant friction in traditional expense management processes. Another expense management company, KDS, recently published new research on corporate travel spend habits and found that 73 percent of employees are tasked with managing all of their receipts from a business trip in a single place, and only 11 percent do so by scanning or logging them into a digital portal.

Further, 41 percent of employees said they are forced to use manual T&E processes to generate an expense report and that they spend up to an hour to do so. Nearly a fifth said it takes them as long as two hours.

Finally, KDS also revealed that 22 percent of employees round up their mileage, just a glimpse into the potential for manual expense reporting tools to enable expense fraud and errors.