While Finance teams have been slow to adopt AI for fear of errors or hallucination, Stampli’s AI has been successfully deployed in one of Finance’s most sensitive functions for years.
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Oct. 3, 2023 — Stampli, a leader in AI-powered accounts payable automation, today announced that it has raised $61 million in a Series D venture funding round led by funds managed by Blackstone, with the participation of existing investors Insight Partners, SignalFire, Bloomberg Beta, and NextWorld Capital. This latest funding round takes the total amount raised by the company to over $148 million.
Accounts Payable automation and B2B payments represent a massive and largely unpenetrated market. Put simply, every business has to pay bills, which means every business has an accounts payable function. Sizing the market opportunity, Deutsche Bank Research estimated in 2021 that AP automation and ePayments combined represent ~$70bn in US revenue opportunity, not including the international opportunity, which they estimated could be ~3-5x larger.
Launched in 2015, Stampli is today one of the fastest-growing providers of accounts payable automation and ePayment services. In August alone, Stampli processed more than 1 million invoices totaling a collective value of more than $5 billion.
A model for AI in sensitive financial applications
Stampli’s 1,300 accounts payable automation customers trust its AI with invoice capture, expense allocation, approval routing, fraud detection, and more.
These activities are the final checkpoint before money is released, which means there’s zero tolerance for errors or hallucinations.
This safe and effective use of AI is significant because today’s CFOs feel immense pressure to embrace AI for faster workflows, lower costs, and fewer mistakes. But AI is infamous for issues with data security and unpredictable outcomes. Stampli’s success demonstrates that AI can succeed even in finance. Stampli also provides a blueprint for CFOs to maintain human validation of critical data as well as to ensure rank-and-file team members accept AI as a partner.
“Before we brought on Stampli, our AP team was nervous that the AI would be a threat rather than an asset to their jobs,” says Amanda Brown, Controller of Wenspok Companies, a $150M+ Wendy’s franchisee that operates 67 restaurant locations in 10 states. “But with Billy the Bot now performing such time-consuming manual tasks as coding invoices to the correct general ledger accounts, the AP team has seen their responsibilities shift to projects that add much greater value to the business. Today, we think of Billy as a team member, not an AI. Honestly, we love Billy the Bot and frequently refer to it by name.”
Stampli’s core promise: Implementation without disruption
The efficiency and cost benefits of accounts payable automation are widely known. For CFOs, the overriding concern in choosing a provider is minimizing the disruption of implementation to existing processes and the ERP systems, and ensuring the fastest time to value.
Stampli’s solution is designed specifically to eliminate implementation risk. Stampli builds its ERP integrations in-house to support the full range of native functionality, allowing customers to implement without reworking their ERP, changing their existing processes, or engaging expensive consultants; in addition, it reduces deployment time to days instead of months. Stampli’s adaptability makes it especially well-suited for complex multi-entity corporate structures, highly regulated industries such as healthcare, and businesses that have already automated their AP but are disappointed with their current provider.
“Stampli has reduced our invoice processing time by 75%, which has a strategic impact on cash flow management,” says Brown. “With a more accurate picture of our operating costs, Wenspok leadership can schedule major operational projects with confidence in budgeting and timing of cash flow requirements. At the tactical level, Stampli has created efficiencies across the board — not just on the AP team, but for all our operating team members outside of finance that we consult to validate the bills we receive. The average invoice approval time has dropped from 16 days to 2 days, and we think we will bring that number down even further.”
Stampli offers its fast implementation for more than 70 different ERPs, including systems from Sage, Oracle, Microsoft, QuickBooks, SAP, Acumatica, IBM and many others. Beyond Accounts Payable, Stampli offers an integrated suite of FinTech products, including Stampli Credit Card and Stampli Direct Pay.
Blackstone’s focus on AI and strategic finance
This investment in Stampli highlights Blackstone’s thematic focus on investing in businesses driving the digitization of the economy, as well as those enabling and benefitting from AI adoption. In Stampli, Blackstone sees a company that is well positioned at the intersection of these trends.
With stakes in more than 230 companies and 12,600 real estate assets, Blackstone uniquely understands the strategic necessity to automate legacy processes with the benefit of AI technology, and it is excited to partner with Stampli as it continues to work to ensure that its portfolio is equipped with the right tools and technologies needed to succeed.
Additionally, Blackstone has been an industry pioneer in its commitment to invest significant resources to streamline procurement across its portfolio and then garner strategic insights across spend categories from that data. Stampli stands to benefit from Blackstone’s reach and scale as it builds a best-in-class offering.
Quotes
Eyal Feldman, CEO and Co-founder of Stampli, said, “In this macroeconomic environment, where companies have to be more careful with their spend and their cash, Stampli became the solution of choice due to our superb user experience, super-fast implementation and deep ERP integration capabilities. We chose Blackstone as our partner because of our shared vision and experience driving operational efficiencies through best practices, technology and AI. I am honored that they see a similar fit in our company. Together, we will make Stampli one of the largest FinTech companies in the world.”
Yifat Oron, Senior Managing Director at Blackstone and head of the firm’s office in Israel, said, “In today’s environment, building a digital-first modern finance organization is a top priority for CFOs and controllers. While we are still in the early innings of AP automation, Stampli stands out as a transformative leader in this extremely large, underpenetrated market. Stampli’s best-in-class team has built a product loved by customers and differentiated by its ease-of-use and out of the box integration. We are thrilled to have Stampli join our growing portfolio of innovative companies.”
Praveen Akkiraju, Managing Director at Insight Partners, said, “Stampli continues to provide a differentiated accounts payable automation platform by building deep ERP integrations and best-in-market AI/ML features that bring enterprise-grade functionality to the midmarket. We’re excited to continue our partnership with Stampli as they expand and grow.”
MARKET DATA SOURCE: Deutsche Bank Research. “Understanding the B2B Payments Sector.” Published 6 October 2021.
About Stampli
Stampli is a complete AP automation platform that brings together accounts payable communications, documentation, and payments in one place. By centering communications on top of the invoice itself, AP departments collaborate and communicate better with approvers, vendors, and anyone involved with purchases, allowing approvals to happen 5x faster. Stampli’s AI, Billy the Bot, learns an organization’s unique patterns to simplify GL and costing-related coding, automate approval and verification flows, identify duplicate invoices, and reduce time spent on manual data entry. Stampli’s flexible platform fits seamlessly into any existing processes and integrates with financial systems, including NetSuite, Sage Intacct, QuickBooks, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, and more. For more information, visit stampli.com.
About Blackstone
Blackstone is the world’s largest alternative asset manager. We seek to create positive economic impact and long-term value for our investors, the companies we invest in, and the communities in which we work. We do this by using extraordinary people and flexible capital to help companies solve problems. Our $1 trillion in assets under management include investment vehicles focused on private equity, real estate, private and liquid credit, infrastructure, life sciences, growth equity, public securities and secondary funds, all on a global basis. Further information is available at www.blackstone.com. Follow @blackstone on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram.
SOURCE Stampli
