London and Copenhagen-based fintech startup Pleo, which offers smart company payment cards, has closed an additional $3.25 million investment led by Creandum, the leading European VC that has previously backed category leaders including Spotify, iZettle, Klarna and Vivino.
Seedcamp, a London-based early-stage seed investment fund, and previous investor Founders also participated. This additional funding extends its seed round to $5.5m in total.
Pleo lets businesses distribute company cards with individually-assigned limits to employees in just a couple of clicks. Pleo’s software automatically matches receipts to payments, eliminating expense report headaches and providing a real-time overview of company spending. On top of that, it integrates directly with accounting software providers, so tedious bookkeeping tasks are done automatically.
“Making purchases in our private life is becoming easier, but business purchases are still burdened with outdated and broken processes, before and after each payment is done. With Pleo we help businesses cut down this time and empower employees, keeping managers in full control over all their finances.
“As a result, we are seeing great feedback from our customers and are winning business from the existing banks, and on top of that, we’re expanding the market size, which is why we are now growing our team,” says CEO of Pleo, Jeppe Rindom, who co-founded the company together with Niccolo Perra, both early employees at the Danish startup success, Tradeshift.
Johan Brenner, General Partner at Creandum, who will be joining the Pleo board, comments, “Dealing with expenses today involves too many manual processes and creates friction for businesses everywhere. With Pleo, it’s now easy to buy things for work and seamlessly manage and control expenses. There are lots of expense apps out there but none that provides the ease of use and integrated solution. We just love strong teams and great products and are proud to partner up with Jeppe and Nicco,” said Brenner.
Since launching in private beta in Denmark and the UK in August, more than a thousand companies have signed up for early access. Pleo’s team has been onboarding new companies daily at an increasingly rapid pace, proving that there is a huge need in the market for solving the business spending problem.
“Pleo’s different approach to company spending has already proven to solve most of our issues. No more sharing of one credit card, department managers and finance can always see in real-time what has been spent and by who, and we have instant access to the receipts, so finance department doesn’t spend time on matching receipts to statements,” says Kasper Sommer, Finance Director of Planday, who adds, “As more employees switch to Pleo, we can see we are saving more time. Besides that, we also see that this system will help drive down general spend when data is so open and easily accessible”.
Pleo is currently available for companies in Denmark and UK through a monthly subscription, which includes both the cards and the software. In the upcoming months, Pleo will be growing their team in the UK, introducing more features to help companies handle subscriptions, and work on integrating with more software providers.