AppZen reels in $35m to expand real-time auditing

October 30, 2018

AppZen, which provides an AI solution for back office automation, has closed a $35m Series B financing led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

Existing Series A investor Redpoint Ventures and seed investor Resolute Ventures also participated in the round, which brings its total funding to date to $52m.

The company intends to use the funds scale its team worldwide and expand its AI-powered product suite from expenses into invoices and contracts.

Since launching its audit technology 18 months ago, AppZen has attracted over 650 customers. including twenty-five Fortune 1000 companies. It counts the likes of Amazon, Citi, Hitachi, Salesforce, Comcast, Intuit, Airbus, and CBS in its client roster.

Headquartered in San Jose, California, AppZen uses artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the auditing process of a company’s overall spend. Leveraging patented AI technology, the company’s system uses computer vision, deep learning, and natural language processing to automatically read and audit expense reports, receipts, invoices and contracts while cross-checking that information against hundreds of online data sources.

This enables Accounts Payable and T&E teams to detect fraud, compliance issues and pricing violations within minutes of an expense report or invoice submission.

“We remain focused on our goal to become the AI platform that audits all business processes in real time, driven by the organization’s CFO,” said Anant Kale, co-founder and CEO of AppZen. “The AI-driven future of work has matured to the back office, transforming the workplace to make companies more efficient and pleasant places to work.”

AppZen claims its AI-powered expense auditing and compliance platform reduces annual T&E spend by up to 5% and drastically improves compliance and the employee experience.
The technology improves financial risk detection tenfold and cuts human resources required to process expense reports by up to 90%. It frees up finance teams to take a more analytical role and make data-driven decisions one step removed from the transactional tasks of daily workflows.

“Business processes in the enterprise back office are manual, rules-based, and cumbersome, which makes them a perfect target for AI,” said Arif Janmohamed, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “We see many AI companies that lack the context and personalization to form the foundations of Authentic Artificial Intelligence. AppZen’s team invested over five years to build a sophisticated Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing platform that is now trusted by hundreds of the world’s most demanding enterprises for expense audits.”