UK-based VC Balderton Capital participates in £19M funding round of travel expenses AI startup Yokoy

Yokoy is a pioneering platform that provides an AI-based full spend management suite catering to the unique needs of midsize and enterprise companies. Now, the all-in-one global spend management platform has announced that it has raised $26 million (nearly £19 million) in a Series A funding round.

Global expansion plans

The financing round was led by US investor Left Lane Capital along with participation from prominent UK-based investor, Balderton Capital.

Yokoy will use the investment to expand deeper into the US, Europe and other global markets. Also, the funding will be used to further enhance the technologies underpinning the platform to stay at the cutting-edge of its AI, automation and security systems.

Dr. Devis Lussi, Co-Founder & CTO said: “With Yokoy we’re building a highly intelligent, highly secure, and highly customisable global spend management platform that empowers our customers to take control of their vast corporate spending processes and fine tune their workflows. We’re helping them to cut costs, save time and bring clarity to their global operations in a way that fits their ambitions. It’s this that we believe will see us becoming the leading spend management platform in the world.”

Christoph Kühne, Head of Group Finance On AG “Building and managing our Finance processes in a global growth setup is a challenging endeavor which requires reliable and stable end-to-end integrations in the IT realm, as well as compliance with different country-specific regulations for tax and accounting topics. Yokoy is that solution, providing us with full, two-way integration between their Spend Management solution and our ERP system landscape, significantly reducing the time and effort spent working on cross-tool processes while increasing the turnaround time.”

Vinny Pujji, Managing Partner at Left Lane Capital said: “Corporate spend management has been a slow-moving category with clunky solutions; but for good reason, given the unique regulatory, product, and security requirements. Yokoy’s easy-to-use but robust spend management suite is enabled by AI and offers flexibility, scale, and security to customers, from startup to enterprise. We are thrilled to partner with such a passionate and empathetic team, led by Philippe.”

Minimises cost of spending management

Founded in Switzerland in 2019 by Philippe Sahli and Devis Lussi, Yokoy operates with the mission to finally rid the corporate spending world of the legacy processes that have plagued it for decades, resulting in companies spending an average of $60 for every single expense that moves through their existing manual, and outdated workflows.

The biggest cost drivers to companies when it comes to spend management are manual work, transaction fees and errors. These costs can be cut by 50% if resource-intensive processes are automated, and cut by more than 90% when AI is combined with automated processing and real-time API integrations, as is the case with Yokoy.

Yokoy brings the cost of spending management down by $1,000 per employee per year. To put this into perspective, a midsize company could realistically save $1 million a year, while getting more satisfied employees, analytics and big data opportunities and control over all spend activities with Yokoy.

It’s this impact fuelled by Yokoy’s dedication to building the very best AI in its in-house research lab; its commitment to security; its flexibility; and its global reach that has seen the firm become the trusted spend management platform for more than 400 leading midsize and enterprise customers worldwide including DPD Group, Stadler Rail, Russia’s Sberbank, the Swiss bank Swissquote. Since its launch two years ago, Yokoy has grown to more than 400 customers, more than 80,000 users, five global offices, and almost 100 employees.