Zurich-based fintech Expense Robot has today announced raising seed funding of €1.6 million in a round co-led by Swisscom and SIX.
This Swiss startup is leveraging artificial intelligence to fully automate expense- and company credit card processes. On average today, it takes 20 minutes of manual work to process one single expense report, costing a company €55 on average, and leaving all involved parties frustrated and uncertain about the reimbursement.
The Expense Robot team set out to create new system – maximum 5 seconds of manual work per expense and business credit card transaction and no shifting of work from the employee to the finance team. After the successful prototyping and testing, Expense Robot went live with a first wave of customers in September 2019. Since then its team has landed renowned global customers such as Swissquote, Kägi, Ameropa and SkyCell.
Unlike traditional digital solutions, Expense Robot’s technology simplifies the process for all expense management stakeholders – employees, managers and the finance team – all the way up to booking it into the ERP system. The flexibility of the technology further allows complex setups and thereby supports multi-legal entity, multi-currency and rank-specific policies.
This new seed round was co-led by Swisscom Ventures and SIX, with participation from Angel investors like Gian Reto à Porta, Founder of Contovista and Myke Näf, Founder of Doodle. The startup will use the funding to expand its mission and grow the team.
“Having Swisscom Ventures and SIX as lead-investors is a strong signal of the market’s interest in our approach of digitizing the expense- and business credit card process end-to-end” says Philippe Sahli, Co-founder and CEO of Expense Robot, “our goal is to revolutionize business spending in general in order for our customers to focus on their daily business – imagine you pay something on behalf of your company and within seconds get reimbursed on your bank account while the correct entry with VAT is already in the financial system.”
“The experienced team behind Expense Robot convinced us that their platform can revolutionize the expense and business credit card processes in Swiss companies and abroad”, says Alexander Schlaepfer, investment partner at Swisscom Ventures. “We are excited to support Expense Robot’s further growth in this underserved market.”
