AppZen, the world's leading AI platform for modern finance teams, announced today that it has secured $50 million in Series C funding led by Coatue Management. Existing investors Redpoint Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated in the round. This brings the company's total investment to more than $100 million. AppZen will use the new funding to accelerate its mission to become the leading artificial intelligence (AI) platform for CFOs and their teams to reduce spend, comply with policy and streamline process.

AppZen automates manual processes, uncovers problems, and optimizes decision making for more than 1,500 global enterprises including Airbus, Amazon, Novartis, and Salesforce. Its AI platform combines patented computer vision, deep learning and semantic analysis with intelligence from thousands of online sources to understand financial transactions in business context and make decisions before those transactions happen. Starting with expenses and payables, AppZen's vision is to assist decision making across a large swath of finance, including spend, revenue, cash, treasury, and beyond. The company will focus on pain points at the intersection of process automation, pre-transaction decision making, and the integration of intelligence from high volumes of internal and external data.

"AppZen allows enterprises to do something they've never been able to do - audit 100 percent of their spend at scale with the team they have, all before payments go out the door. AI lets CFOs dramatically reduce spend, comply with policy and streamline process as they pursue their digital transformation goals," said Thomas Laffont, Senior Managing Director for Coatue Management. "When we met Anant, Kunal and the team, we were struck by their AI expertise and finance transformation vision, not to mention the company's clear and rapid execution in the market."

"Until now, true digital transformation in the CFO's organization has been limited. Many finance processes require time-consuming analysis of documents like contracts, invoices and receipts. Our AI technology learns from data, intelligence from thousands of internal and online sources, and the collective feedback from thousands of finance professionals. The result is the most effective spend auditing solution in the market today, powered by an AI platform that has been architected to solve the most critical business needs across all of finance," said Anant Kale, Co-Founder and CEO of AppZen. "With this funding, we are able to focus on expanding our AI, engineering and product teams while maintaining our unique company culture, supporting the needs of our customers, and expanding our capabilities to continue to break ground on AI solutions for enterprise CFOs and their teams."

Recent company highlights

Customers - AppZen recently surpassed the 1,500 customer mark, attracting nearly a third of Fortune 500 companies. As a result, the company quintupled its revenue in 2018 and expanded to over 200 employees. It will increase its workforce by 146 percent by the end of the year, as well as expand its go-to-market efforts globally.
Accounts Payable (AP) and Contract Audit - This year, AppZen expanded its AI platform to include the real-time audit of a company's entire spend process, including procurement, supplier contracts, invoices, T&E expenses and credit cards, building on Expense Audit with the launch of Accounts Payable Audit and Contract Audit.
New offices - AppZen recently opened a new office in Pune, India to tap into the talent and expertise of the area's workforce. The company also expanded its San Jose (headquarters), London, and Arizona locations to onboard new talent and provide global coverage.
Awards and recognition - In the past year, "Great Places to Work" certified AppZen, while Comparably recognized the company for having the "Best Engineering Team." CB Insights listed it among the most promising AI companies in the world, Best in Biz Awards named it one of the fastest-growing startups in 2018 and Enterprise Tech included it in its 2019 list of most promising private companies in enterprise technology.
Patented technology - With its patented technology, AppZen's unique approach to combining computer vision, semantic analysis, and deep learning provides the technical underpinning for our AI platform.
Please visit the AppZen blog for more information about this announcement.

See AppZen at these upcoming events

Chrome River Cascade, September 9-11, booth 13
Shared Services Leaders' Summit: Process and Technology, September 11-12
Digital Procurement World, September 18-19, booth 6
About AppZen

AppZen delivers the world's leading AI platform for modern finance teams. Starting with business spend, we automate manual process, uncover problems, and optimize decision making for enterprises around the globe, including nearly one-third of the Fortune 500. Our platform combines patented deep learning, computer vision, and semantic analysis with intelligence from thousands of online data sources to understand financial transactions in business context and make decisions before those transactions happen. AppZen is a must have for CFOs and their teams to reduce spend, comply with policy, and streamline process.

Since we released our platform in 2016, over 1,500 enterprises have standardized on AppZen, including four of the top five banks, four of the top ten media companies, three of the top ten pharmaceutical manufacturers, two of the top five aerospace companies, and five of the top ten software providers. Visit us at www.appzen.com and follow us on Twitter at @AppZen.