China’s Expense Management Startup Fenbeitong Raises $36M In Series B+

Chinese business expense management startup Fenbeitong closed a $36 million Series B+ funding round led by Eight Roads, Ribbit Capital and Glade Brook Capital, according to reports on Tuesday (March 10). 

Other participants in the new round included BitRock Capital and existing shareholders IDG Capital, CreditEase Industry Fund and China Growth Capital. The Beijing startup raised $12.36 million in a Series B round in July led by Bojiang Capital. Fenbeitong has so far raised a total of $57.7 million.

Founded in 2015 by Xi Lan, who serves as the chief executive officer, Fenbeitong developed a corporate wallet app that enabled users to manage, pay and receive reimbursement for business expenses. 

With past funding, Fenbeitong added a virtual card payment function and launched two subsidiaries for corporate travel and enterprise services.

The new funds will be used for further optimization of the product and to expand Fenbeitong’s workforce with additional research and development staff, Lan said. The platform is also planning to target key indicators — payment scenarios and payment times — and “establish a channel system to maintain a high growth rate.” 

“We have seen unicorns like Brex, Divvy, and TripActions emerging in the space of corporate expense management in the United States. They have obtained wide acknowledgment from high-growth enterprises by helping them integrate the expense management of credit card payments and business travel expenditures,” Lan said in a statement, Deal Street Asia reported. “The same market trend is happening in China. Fenbeitong has realized a threefold growth in annual revenue over the past two years, and we expect to retain this growth pace in 2020.”

Lan said the company has a workforce of roughly 260 employees, with 10 percent being research and development staff.

“Chinese mobile payment has long surpassed developed countries such as Europe and the United States, and the corporate financial services sector is still in the ascendant,” said Ray Chua, a partner at Ribbit Capital. As Ribbit Capital’s first investment project in China, Fenbeitong’s disruptive solution — ‘Payment + Scenario + Control’ is highly extensible, which can not only reduce costs and increase efficiency for the enterprise, but also help its partners to improve services and expand sales channels, with the potential to precipitate massive data resources.”

Numerous unicorns were among the hundreds of Chinese tech firms that toppled in 2019 as the economy soured and startups went through piles of cash. The tech closures come as a funding shortage has investors wrestling with the end of a venture capital boom.