Payables firm Spenmo on its way to becoming Singapore’s next unicorn

spenmo fintech payables
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The valuation of Singapore-based payables software startup Spenmo has surpassed $500 million following a $85 million Series B funding round.

The financing was led by Tiger Global, which included both primary and secondary transactions. According to DealStreetAsia – DATA VANTAGE, Tiger Global now owns a nearly 11% stake in the fintech startup after the capital injection.

As early as December of last year, DealStreet Asia reported that Spenmo was in talks with Tiger Global regarding the former’s upcoming Series B funding round.

Insight Partners, Global Founders Capital, Rocket Internet, and Alpha JWC Ventures also participated in the Series B funding round. According to company documents, the company has decreased its employee stock option pool (ESOP) in conjunction with the financing.

Just last September, Spenmo raised a $34 million Series A from Insight Partners, a New York-based investment firm best known for its ScaleUp initiative. This is considered to be one of the largest Series A funding rounds clinched by a Singaporean startup.

Founder and CEO Mohandass Kalaichelvan said in an interview with TechCruch that Spenmo originated as an expense management platform before realizing that expenses “are just a tiny sliver” of a company’s payables.

“[Companies] use a tool for expense management, which is a silo, something else for vendor payments, something else for payroll, and all these bank accounts they have to manage. We quickly realized that gave us an opportunity to bring all of these things into one place and reduce the silos that teams have to manage,” he said.

Spenmo serves as a cross-border money transfer service for around 80% of its clients, who maintain many bank accounts in Southeast Asia. For example, if a business has 500 invoices and bank accounts in Singapore and Indonesia, Spenmo aids its finance staff in deciding how the transactions will be made and from where they will be made.

Spenmo is also keen to expand its presence in Vietnam and Indonesia, where the increasing number of small- and medium-sized enterprises, as well as lots of payment gateways, make managing payables much more difficult.

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