Newly Funded Airbase Consolidates Spend Management

Airbase, a spend management company looking to consolidate a range of expense management processes for organizations, has announced new funding for its technology.

According to reports, First Round Capital led a $7 million Series A round for Airbase, with Maynard Webb, BoxGroup, Quiet Capital and Village Global also participating. The financing reportedly closed at the end of last November but was not revealed until this week, when Airbase officially announced its product launch.

In an interview with the publication, Founder and CEO Thejo Kote described the firm as “the first all-in-one spend management system.”

“It replaces a number of different systems that companies use to manage how they spend money,” he added, noting that organizations can struggle to manage their hundreds of expenditures, and are often forced to rely on disparate and fragmented processes.

In addition to the challenge of managing that spend, businesses also struggle to streamline the reporting, spend approval and employee expense and reimbursement processes. There is also the expense outflow of invoice payments, all of which must be recorded in accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

Airbase aims to streamline expense management across this range of processes, including employee expense, company spend, procurement and invoice payments, and more. The company connects with a business’ bank and existing accounting system, and offers companies a virtual Airbase Visa card to replace physical cards in the company.

Spend requests and approvals occur within the Airbase platform, as do bookkeeping and reconciliation of transactions after they are made on a virtual card. That data is then pushed into back-office systems.

“Airbase has taken a bold step forward to create an entirely new paradigm,” said First Round Capital General Partner and Lead Investor Bill Trenchard in a statement. “It delivers a real solution to the biggest problems finance teams face as their companies grow.”