"I just love collecting receipts, scanning them, filling out an Excel spreadsheet and waiting to get reimbursed," said no one ever. So, someone decided to do something about it and change the way corporate expenses and company credit cards are managed. That someone is the Israeli fintech company Mesh Payments, which has developed a payment management platform for organizations– a sort of "virtual corporate credit card". Yesterday (Wednesday) Mesh announced a new fundraising round of $60 million dollars led by the Alpha Wave Fund – which previously invested in Alibaba, SpaceX, Uber, and Lyft. Tiger Global, TLV Partners, Entree Capital and Meron Capital also participated in the round.
To make the lives of financiers a little easier
Mesh Payments issues a virtual corporate credit card with the option of online and offline payments, and connection to digital wallets such as Apple Pay, Google Pay and more. This way, companies do not have to depend on a physical credit card, and can pay per transaction, manage all payments in one place and automate all receipts. So now, the financial personnel of the company do not have to chase after receipts, can cancel payments with one click, confirm payment and automatically update the system, ERP and more. In addition, the company provides a dashboard with insights on the payments that have been made and will be made. The company's clients include Monday.com, Hippo, Sezzle, Riskified and Snyk.
In a conversation with Geektime, Oded Zehavi, co-founder and CEO of Mesh, said that in recent months the company added the ability to issue a physical credit card without a number, which connects to any virtual card in its system. In addition, the company announced a cooperation agreement with another Israeli fintech company – Papaya Global.
For the past two years, Mesh has been counting on companies needing to improve automation and control over the payments they make, especially when employees are scattered everywhere while working from home. "The finance people had to deal with dispersed employees, expenses and growth in cloud and SaaS structures, and adapt themselves with appropriate solutions. We were at the right time and in the right place when this change began," Zehavi once mentioned to us. He said that the company is mainly aimed at the American market, and as of today it has more than a thousand global companies that it works with.
We are now in a challenging time for startups. Did you feel difficulties when raising funds?
"The market has changed dramatically, but it is in such a market that the demand for a solution like ours, which helps customers save time and money and plan their expenses more correctly, has only increased, and thanks to this and the trust of our existing customers, we have been able to gain the trust of investors during this recruitment."
