It’s a strong Tuesday for the Israeli fintech ecosystem with Israeli startup Tipalti announcing a $150 million mega-funding round Series E. The investment was based on a company valuation of over $2 billion, which adds yet another Israeli Unocorn to the ranks, and led by Durable Capital Partners. The investment round also saw participation from Greenoaks Capital and Advisors 01, which was founded by former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.
“We are pleased to have the opportunity to increase our investment in Tipalti during a time in which organizations have been focused on rapidly transforming and modernizing the way they operate,” said Dick Costolo, Founding Partner of 01 Advisors and former Chief Executive Officer of Twitter. “When I ran Twitter, I saw first-hand the importance and value of Tipalti in automating financial operations. Tipalti transformed our processes and opened up our expansion, growth, and scalability strategies.”
Automating an organization’s pesky payments
Tipalti developed a system for organizations to automate accounts payable, whether it be for local or global suppliers. The automated system routes the invoice through the internal authorization pipeline according to the user’s defined parameters and connects to the accounting network. This results in an average of 80% reduction in workload for an organization’s accounting department.
In a talk with Geektime, CEO and Founder Chen Amit explains that Tipalti provides accounts payable solutions for medium and large scale enterprises, including Amazon, National Geographic, GoDaddy, Twitter, and more. “They also require similar payroll management solutions to those of our market-leading customers, but they don’t have the resources to develop a solution like that alone. Therefore, they demand a deep solution to combat their main payable challenges. As the customer gets bigger, its demand becomes broader.” In addition, Amit adds that the company holds a 99% retention rate.
Tipalti’s last funding round was last year, with the fintech company securing $76 million based on a market value of $460 million. Whereas this recent round quadruples the company’s valuation, thrusting it far past the Unicorn club startline. Amit believes that the COVID crisis has only accelerated the demand for the company’s solution. One of the main reasons being that it, according to Amit, reduces up to 80% of the manual workload, especially during times of personnel furloughs and cutbacks. In addition, during times where getting two executives to sign off on a check is nearly impossible, the digital system’s remote management capabilities become a blessing in disguise.
According to the company’s analysis, COVID reality has been good for business, as Tipalti has its footprint on over $12 billion in global transactions and experienced 80% growth in Q2 2020 in comparison to last year’s Q2. Tipalti was founded in 2010 by CEO Chen Amit and Oren Zeev, founding partner at Zeev Ventures. The company has 350 employees, with 126 of them based in Israel. Tipalti tells that the funds will be put towards talent recruitment and doubling its products’ road map, while also expanding global market value.
