Payhawk, the payment and expense solution with offices in London, Sofia, Berlin, and Barcelona, has secured an additional $100 million in order to extend its Series B round to $215 million.
The Fintech firm’s Series B extension was reportedly “raised at a valuation of $1 billion, making Payhawk the first ever Bulgarian company to achieve unicorn status.” The company now intends to “become a catalyst for the Bulgarian startup ecosystem, and continue to attract and retain the top 1% of talent in the market.”
The new funding has been announced about three months after the first wave of Payhawk’s Series B, which was “the second-largest Series B for a B2B company in Central and Eastern Europe”
The firm has raised an additional $100m in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners at a valuation of $1 billion. As covered, the previous investment round in November 2021 valued the firm at $570 million. After continuing to double its annualized recurring revenue every quarter, the valuation “is set to hit $1bn.”
New investors joining the round are Sprints Capital, Endeavor Catalyst, HubSpot Ventures and Jigsaw VC. All existing investors including Greenoaks, QED Partners and Earlybird Digital East “are participating.”
The Fintech will use the funds “to further grow its product team, double down on its efforts to build best-in-class enterprise features, and expand the sales and marketing team for new market penetration in 2022.”
At present, finance teams still do a considerable amount of manual work “due to multiple disconnected tools for cards, payments, invoices, and expense management.” Payhawk reduces this by combining those key elements “in a single platform.” The company also “provides an industry-first 3% cashback on card payments up to the full subscription amount, enabling customers to drive their subscription costs to zero, while benefiting from enterprise-grade software.”
Payhawk aims to serve as the platform for large SMEs and enterprise customers, “especially those with a multinational footprint.” The company “serves businesses in 30 countries across a variety of industries, currencies and payment methods.”
The proceeds should support further growth for Payhawk’s product team by adding 60 additional senior software engineers in Sofia “from the top 1% of the market.”
This is with the aim of “meeting growing customer demand for new features like mileage tracking and per diem, in light of the incremental return of business travel.” Other existing features for enterprise customers will be extended too, “including Oracle Netsuite integration, Subscription Management and Budgets.”
As noted by the firm:
“Building on the momentum from the first influx of Series B capital, Payhawk is set to open offices in Amsterdam and Paris in March, and in New York in September. The company’s headcount is also set to triple from 100 to more than 300 by the end of this year, with the extra funds set to fuel a renewed sales and marketing push for further market expansion.”
Arsham Memarzadeh, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, said:
“Payhawk is more than just spend management software. It’s a one-stop-shop for finance teams to consolidate the previously disparate systems required to spend, track, process, and budget corporate funds. After getting to know the team for over a year, we’ve been blown away with their pace of product development, building the most comprehensive solution in the market in less than four years.”
Hristo Borisov, CEO and Founder of Payhawk, added:
“We always knew that we could build a big company if we addressed a significant problem in a large market. The size of the opportunity still drives our growth and ambition today. Every employee that deals with company payments feels that there should be a better way to do it, but this huge problem was never tackled by a strong product team with a hardcore engineering background. This is what Payhawk brings to the market.”