Fintech startup Pleo, an all-in-one business spending platform that provides smart company cards to automate expense reports, announced a € 50 Million Series B financing. The round is led by Stripes, a New York-based growth fund, with participation from existing investors, Kinnevik, Creandum and Founders.The round brings the total amount raised by the company to over € 70 million.
“We are thrilled to partner with Jeppe and the rest of the Pleo team on their mission to reshape business spending across all verticals and geographies, and to help fuel their ambitious growth journey,” added
Ken Fox, Founder and Partner of Stripes.
Founded in 2015 by Jeppe Rindom and Niccolo Perra, Pleo combines payment cards, that can be easily distributed to all company employees, with software and mobile apps to automatically match receipts and track all company spending in real-time with detailed analytics. The service is currently available in the UK, Denmark, Sweden and Germany, more han 3500 companies across all verticals and all sizes have chosen Pleo, with hundreds joining every month.
“By putting our primary focus on the employee experience from day one, we have been able to achieve outstanding growth, receive raving reviews and enjoy extremely strong customer satisfaction and loyalty.” says Jeppe Rindom, co-founder at Pleo.
The company is planning to rapidly expand its headcount from 120 to 400 employees by the end of next year, as it also aims to own the entire purchase experience within businesses, including adding credit, invoices, mobile payments, a vendor marketplace, VAT reclaim and much more.
“We are building a solution that is changing not just how companies spend money, but also how they operate and can enable the staff to be more efficient. Making work-related purchases has traditionally been a centralised and micro-managed process. We’ve built Pleo to allow modern leaders to empower and trust all the employees to buy stuff for work, whilst making it more transparent and safe,” says Jeppe
The round had the existing investors participating as well. Kinnevik, the Swedish investment giant that has been both in telecom and the biggest backer of Rocket Internet, including Zalando. Creandum, one of Swedens biggest tech VCs which have backed startups including Spotify, iZettle, and Vivino. And Founders, a Copenhagen based startups studio, backed by both Kirkbi (majority owner of Lego) and Oticon Foundation (majority owner of the hearing aid company William Demant).
