Today we announced the closing of $35 million Series B financing led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Existing Series A investor Redpoint Ventures and seed investor Resolute Ventures also participated.
AppZen is growing extremely quickly. Since the launch of our AI technology to market 18 months ago, AppZen has attracted 650+ customers, including 25 Fortune 1000 companies. I’m thrilled by the dedication from our growing team and the support from new and returning investors to help us realize our vision. We had 20 employees on January 1, 2018; today we have more than 100, and that number needs to keep growing to deliver top-flight products and services to all our great customers around the world.
We’ll be using the funds to scale our team worldwide and expand our product suite into other areas of spend outside of just expense reports — a major step toward our goal of applying artificial intelligence to automate business processes across the enterprise back office. Now with the addition of invoices and contracts to our AI spend audit platform, customers will see an even greater increase in efficiency and savings across their procure to pay process, magnitudes above what our expense audit product is already delivering.
Above all else, the transformation of an outdated spend process is what we’re most excited about. Our expense audit product has single-handedly removed team managers from the mundane task of having to approve expense reports, given managers better visibility into their overall team spend, and gets employees reimbursed as quickly as same day in some cases. These AI-driven process transformations are helping companies compete in the 21st century and retain top talent, and we look forward to applying these same efficiency principles across the overall spend process.
I am so excited for this next chapter in AppZen’s history and am extremely thankful for our supportive investors and our devoted, brilliant team.