Cash administration — monitoring who wants to pay an bill and whether or not it’s been achieved — could make or break a enterprise. Now, a startup constructing SaaS software program to assist finance departments handle this extra intelligently is asserting some funding to broaden after seeing robust demand.
Growfin, a Singapore- and San Francisco–based mostly fintech startup that gives SaaS for finance departments to monitor and accumulate funds and to assist handle the accounts receivable course of, has raised a $7.5 million Collection A. The corporate plans to use this funding to proceed increasing within the U.S. and Asia, and to double down on constructing extra AI-based know-how to broaden its platform. Subsequent up: a forecasting instrument that predicts traits “based mostly on previous fee habits and present receivables knowledge via Growfin.”
Singapore’s SWC World led the funding spherical with participation from current backers 3one4 Capital and angel traders. The startup touts that the most recent funding comes on the again of 8x development in buyer numbers over the past 12 months, throughout which Growfin has helped shoppers accumulate greater than $1 billion in account receivables (AR). Growfin has now raised $9 million in complete, and it’s not disclosing its valuation.
Growfin is tapping right into a ripe market, not least due to the present financial local weather and the pressures that it’s placing on companies of all sizes.
A recent report from Gartner discovered that 78% of CFOs have invested in automation and cash movement visibility know-how. However whereas they’re more and more keen to pay for instruments to assist them plan for the longer term, when it comes to present accounts, many nonetheless depend on spreadsheets, exposing a gulf between having visibility of an organization’s present monetary state and figuring out how that hyperlinks up with what it would seem like in per week, month or 12 months.
Growfin’s preliminary product was an AI-powered finance CRM, which finance, gross sales and buyer success groups might use to join in a single place to deal with buyer relationships throughout fee and cash-collecting processes, a intelligent bridging product that speaks to how the pull of accounts receivable departments would possibly generally do higher if they might be a part of forces and data with those that handle the vast majority of the client relationship prior to that time. (And certainly, a smoother expertise may lead to extra gross sales sooner or later.)
As a substitute of constructing an AR automation product, the corporate made a finance CRM that not solely automates finance accounts receivable workflows but additionally gives the best collaboration capabilities and real-time visibility to gross sales, buyer success and prospects themselves in a single place (the place all of them see the identical data).
That first push into extra finance visibility caught on. Growfin’s main customers at present scale B2B tech corporations in SaaS, adtech, logistics tech, and edtech, and it now has 25 prospects, together with Intercom, Fourkites, Mindtickle, LeadSquared, and Quick Dry Restoration, co-founder and CEO of Growfin, Aravind Gopalan, instructed ClassyBuzz. It sells primarily to shoppers who’re finance groups, though as you would possibly guess, revenue-generating groups like gross sales and buyer success are additionally customers of its service. The startup says it’s now at $400,000 in annual recurring income since its launch 12 months in the past.
Picture Credit: Growfin founders (L to R) Aravind Gopalan and Raja Jayaraman
Intercom makes use of Growfin to automate and monitor its collection actions, integrating with NetSuite, Zuora and Salesforce and giving real-time visibility to finance leaders, Gopalan defined. “We helped them cut back their cash collection cycle from 91 days to 59 days in a span of 5 months, enhancing collection effectivity by 35%,” he mentioned.
Locus, a logistics tech startup that makes use of Growfin to resolve bill disputes to accumulate funds quicker, claims it’s improved the productiveness of their groups by 60% in ten months, Gopalan mentioned.
Based in 2021 by Gopalan and Raja Jayaram, the co-founders instructed ClassyBuzz they held conferences with greater than 200 finance leaders worldwide when the product was nonetheless being developed to get extra insights into the issues they sometimes face. The resounding message was that finance groups have been unhappy with legacy programs that have been based mostly round spreadsheets and the costly prospect of merely hiring extra individuals as an answer to the time-consuming workload.
“Managing receivables and amassing funds are sometimes advanced and compound much more as corporations develop. Regardless of the expansion of ERPs and CRMs akin to Salesforce and Netsuite, I’ve understood that 90% of finance groups nonetheless handle their AR (account receivables) processes exterior these instruments, sometimes on spreadsheets or in-house databases,” mentioned Gopalan. “This collaboration-first method will provide higher efficiencies and better transparency and construct trusted relationships between prospects and companies in the direction of amassing B2B funds quicker.”
It employs 40 individuals and plans to double its headcount this 12 months within the U.S., the place most of its shoppers are based mostly, in addition to in Asia.
Growfin’s rivals embrace HighRadius, Upflow, Tesorio, YayPay and Gaviti. ERP service suppliers are an oblique rival, Gopalan mentioned.
“Growfin’s AI-powered system is poised to disrupt how companies accumulate their bill funds by sitting on high of ERP programs like Netsuite and Microsoft dynamics that dominate the trade,” says Tuck Lye Koh, founding companion of SWC World. “Globally, they’ve over 100,000 prospects, and now finance groups beholden to these programs can be ready to plug in Growfin to get a deeper and wider eye into their monetary well-being with real-time cash-flow effectivity and forecasting.”
