Yokoy yokes $80 million in Sequoia-led round

Zurich-based spend management platform Yokoy has raised $80 million in a Series B round. The tool uses a combination of AI tools and API integrations to automate expense management, supplier invoice management, and corporate credit cards, with the ultimate goal of reducing clients’ overall costs. The three-year-old company has raised approximately $107.8 million to date and will use the new funding to further its international expansion plans, as well as continue research and development work in its AI and grow the team size.

Yokoy has a lofty goal: to rid the world, once and for all, of the legacy processes of expense management. The company indicates that companies spend an average of $60 for every expense that passes through old, outdated, and manual workflows. In contrast, the Swiss startup lays claim to the fact that they can cut that number down to $1,000 per employee per year. Looking at the overall picture, this means that a midsized company could save over $1 million a year.

And how?

Yokoy provides midsized to enterprise-level companies with the ability to fully customise their own process flows, integrating with all major third-party tools, and automating as many or as few steps as so chosen. From there, the software takes over, and via a self-learning algorithm continually optimises the process.

The company counts over 500 clients including DPD Group, ASK Chemicals, On, and Bitpanda, resulting in the spend management optimisation of over 80,000 employees, and has grown to a team of over 100 employees.

"We’ve proven with Yokoy that spend management needn’t be a cumbersome, expensive process for global companies. By combining all areas of the journey and automating it in one intuitive platform using artificial intelligence, Yokoy is becoming the ultimate spend management partner for businesses,” commented Yokoy CEO Philippe Sahli.

Yokoy’s $80 million Series B round was led by Sequoia Capital with Speedinvest, Visionaries Club, and Zinal Growth participating. Existing investors Balderton Capital, Six FinTech Ventures, Left Lane, Swisscom Ventures, and a number of angel investors followed on.

"Businesses across Europe are looking for more efficiency and automation as they work to manage their spending. Many solutions have emerged that are card-centric and only answer one piece of this puzzle. We're excited about Yokoy because it is distinctly the only software-first company we met, to bring a complete spend management solution to its customers, using automated processes and including cards,” commented Sequoia’s Matt Miller. “This unique approach evidenced itself in spectacular customer feedback and impressive growth.”