Growfin’s AI-powered fundraising SaaS expands to US and Asia

Cash management – knowing who has to pay a bill and if it’s been done – can make or break a business. Now, a startup developing SaaS software to help financial services manage this smarter is announcing funding to expand after seeing strong demand.

Growfin, a Singapore and San Francisco-based fintech startup that provides SaaS to financial services to track and collect payments and to help manage the accounts receivable process, raised a Series A round of $7.5m . The company plans to use this funding to continue to expand in the United States and Asia, and to redouble its efforts to develop more AI-based technologies to expand its platform. Next step: a forecasting tool that predicts trends “based on past payment behavior and current receivables data via Growfin”.

Singapore’s SWC Global led the funding round with participation from existing backers 3one4 Capital and angel investors. The startup is touting that the latest funding comes on the back of 8x customer growth over the past 12 months, during which Growfin has helped customers collect over $1 billion in accounts receivable (AR). Growfin has now raised $9 million in total and does not disclose its valuation.

Growfin taps into a mature market, especially given the current economic climate and the pressures it puts on businesses of all sizes.

A recent Gartner report found that 78% of CFOs have invested in cash flow automation and technology. But while they’re increasingly willing to pay for tools that will help them plan for the future, when it comes to checking accounts, many still rely on spreadsheets, exposing a chasm between having a visibility into a company’s current financial situation and how it relates to what it might look like in a week, month or year.

Growfin’s initial product was an AI-powered financial CRM that finance, sales, and customer success teams could use to connect in one place to manage customer relationships during checkout and payment processes. collection, a smart bridging product that explains how account mining customer departments could sometimes do better if they could join forces and knowledge with those handling the majority of the customer relationship before that point. (And indeed, a smoother experience could lead to more sales in the future.)

Instead of creating an AR automation product, the company created a financial CRM that not only automates financial accounts receivable workflows, but also provides the right collaboration capabilities and real-time visibility into sales, customer success and the customers themselves in one place (where they all see the same information).

This first push towards more financial visibility has made its way. Growfin’s core users are currently scaling B2B tech companies in SaaS, adtech, logistics tech, and edtech, and it now has 25 customers, including Intercom, Fourkites, Mindtickle, LeadSquared, and Quick Dry Restoration, co- Growfin founder and CEO Aravind Gopalan told TechCrunch. He primarily sells to clients who are finance teams, although as you might guess, revenue-driving teams like sales and customer success are also users of his service. The startup says it is now at $400,000 in annual recurring revenue since launching 12 months ago.

Intercom uses Growfin to automate and track its collection activities, integrating with NetSuite, Zuora and Salesforce and giving real-time visibility to finance managers, Gopalan explained. “We helped them reduce their cash collection cycle from 91 days to 59 days in 5 months, improving collection efficiency by 35%,” he said.

Locus, a logistics technology startup that uses Growfin to resolve billing disputes to collect payments faster, claims to have improved the productivity of its teams by 60% in ten months, Gopalan said.

Founded in 2021 by Gopalan and Raja Jayaram, the co-founders told TechCrunch they held meetings with more than 200 finance executives around the world while the product was still under development to better understand the issues they were facing. are usually faced. The resounding message was that finance teams were unhappy with legacy spreadsheet-based systems and the costly prospect of simply hiring more people as a solution to the time-consuming workload.

“Managing receivables and collecting payments is often complex and gets even more complicated as businesses grow. Despite the growth of ERPs and CRMs such as Salesforce and Netsuite, I realized that 90% of finance teams still manage their AR (accounts receivable) processes outside of these tools, usually on spreadsheets or databases. internal,” Gopalan said. “This collaborative approach will provide greater efficiency and transparency and build trusting relationships between customers and businesses to collect B2B payments faster.”

It employs 40 people and plans to double its workforce this year in the United States, where most of its customers are based, as well as in Asia.

Growfin’s competitors are HighRadius, Upflow, Tesorio, YayPay and Gaviti. ERP service providers are an indirect rival, Gopalan said.

“Growfin’s AI-powered system is poised to disrupt the way businesses collect bill payments by relying on industry-leading ERP systems like Netsuite and Microsoft dynamics,” says Tuck Lye Koh, founding partner of SWC Global. “Globally, they have over 100,000 customers, and now finance teams beholden to these systems will be able to connect to Growfin to gain deeper and broader insight into their financial well-being with efficiency and on-time cash forecasting. real.”