This piece appears in TechCrunch and discusses a funding round for the 2019 startup out of Tel Aviv named PayEm, which provides spend management solutions for MNCs and others. Readers will likely be familiar with the uptick in interest among employees and organizations in general around making work processes easier; in effect digital and certainly more mobile. A number of fintechs are upping the game in the space, among them this recent entry. The posting speaks to a $27 million seed and series A investment by several funds.
‘Itamar Jobani was a software developer working for a medical company and “hated that time of the month” when he had to use the company’s chosen reimbursement tool….“It was full of friction and as part of the company’s wellness team, I felt an urge to take care of the employee experience and find a better tool,” Jobani told TechCrunch. “I looked for something, but didn’t find it, so I tried to build it myself.”….What resulted was PayEm, an Israeli company he founded with Omer Rimoch in 2019 to be a spend and procurement platform for high-growth and multinational organizations.’
We have covered the procure-to-pay space in the past through member research, as well as cross-border, where PayEm seems to be carving out their niche, to make certain parts of financial operations easier for the FPs as well as traveling employees. Given the pandemic and increasing use of APIs for faster and crisper integration between internal systems and external gateways, etc. this easing of the work experience is gaining momentum. So the solution combines a few key processes and products, including the ability to issue corporate cards, which have also become more popular as a means of getting paid faster and safer.
‘The company’s technology automates the reimbursement, procurement, accounts payable and credit card workflows to manage all of the requests and invoices, while also creating bills and sending payments to over 200 territories in 130 currencies…. It gives company finance teams a real-time look at what items employees are asking for funds to buy, and what is actually being spent. For example, teams can submit a request and go through an approval flow that can be customized with purchasing codes tied to a description of the transaction. At the same time, all transactions are continuously reconciled versus having to spend hours at the end of the month going through paperwork…. The company, which also has an office in New York, has 40 employees currently, and the new funds will enable the company to triple its headcount, focusing on hiring in the United States, and to bring additional features and payment capabilities to market.’
Overview by Steve Murphy, Director, Commercial and Enterprise Payments Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
