Pleo, a FinTech startup based in both the UK and Copenhagen, has secured $16m in Series A funding in a bid to simplify company expenses.
The round was led by European venture fund Kinnevik, with participation from Creandum and Seedcamp. With the money, Pleo plans to grow its business across the UK and beyond, into Denmark and other European countries. It also hopes to grow its headcount from 50 to more than 200 employees by the end of 2019, to help scale and accelerate product development.
Pleo raised $3.25m from Creandum back in 2017. This latest round brings the total amount raised by the company to $23m.
The company provides payment cards for companies, which work alongside software that ‘automatically’ categorizes expenses based on previous behaviour and eliminates the need to do manual expense reports. The cards can be assigned to employees with individually set limits, in order to track spending.
Pleo says 10 new businesses join every day, and that around 1500 companies have switched to the service in the past year alone.
Jeppe Rindom, who co-founded Pleo with Niccolo Perra, commented on this: “It’s quite amazing what we have achieved in just a year in only two countries since our launch from beta. We are now ready to expand our services across other Europe countries, where we have already see a lot of demand. The backing from Kinnevik, one of the most reputable European investment funds, will help us achieve our ambitious goals.
“We are expanding our product offerings to fit more complex needs of bigger organisations by adding more customized workflows, different integrations and premium offerings very soon. Our objective is to become a default solution to handle all company spending for businesses of different sizes and needs, in each of the new markets we enter,” he added.
Charlie Gardiner-Hill, COO at The Tab, a UK based student online news service which has rolled out Pleo across its whole organisation, spoke about his experience with the product.
“It has revolutionised how we manage our expenses: staff don’t have to spend their own money, no need to keep receipts and our finance team can keep a track of everything in real time.
“Obviously giving staff prepaid cards is a big change, but if you don’t trust your staff to spend company money responsibly without having to ask first or claim it back retrospectively, then they shouldn’t be on your team anyway,” he concluded.