Today, Airbase announced their Series B, a heavily oversubscribed $60M financing led by Menlo Ventures. We are thrilled to welcome Menlo and Matt Murphy to the Airbase team.

A little over a year ago, we announced our own Series A investment in Airbase and outlined four reasons why we invested in the company: decentralization of spending decisions, modernization of B2B payments, Airbase’s all-in-one vision, and most importantly, founder Thejo Kote and his team. Looking back today, it’s clear that they’ve exceeded our expectations in each area, all while delivering more than 5x growth.

Remote Work Supercharges Decentralized Software Spending

For many years, the steady consumerization of IT has led to more users and teams making their own buying decisions. With more employees working from home over the past year, this trend has only accelerated; not only has coordination around centralized spend decisions become comparatively more expensive, but teams are simply buying and spending more on software, too, to meet new productivity and collaboration needs.

This has not only made our core spend management capabilities more critical, it has opened up new business opportunities, too: Airbase’s launch of international vendor payments responds to the increase in globally-distributed teams, addressing customers who want one centralized system across all their geographies.

No-Contact Digital Payments

Another implication of the pandemic was to make analog payments, such as checks, not only passé, but potentially even unhealthy. Vendors who may have resisted the transition to digital payments have become more receptive, hastening the move away from traditional cash and check options.

More “All” In All-In-One

With Airbase, CFOs and business leaders can manage non-payroll spend end-to-end, replacing various siloed solutions with seamless functionality across bill payment, corporate cards, budgeting and reconciliation, and vendor payments. Airbase is proving to be well-positioned for a future in which the finance function itself is collaborative and integrated across the business, eliminating the need for manual integrations, re-entry of data, and reconciliation across disparate systems.

Since the Series A, Airbase has built on their all-in-one leadership by introducing feature-complete expense reimbursement, modern bill payment, and the industry’s first solution to manage international vendor payments.

Building An All-Star Executive Team

Over the past year, Thejo Kote (founder and CEO of Airbase) has continued to impress us (and his customers) at every turn. In particular, Thejo has transformed the senior team at Airbase, bringing in world-class leaders across functions:

• Emma Dunstone leads marketing, with leadership experience from Showpad, AppDynamics, and True Link;
• Jaakko Iso-Jarvenpaa joins us as head of sales from Dropbox, where he built and grew the HelloSign business;
• Archit Shah spent 4 years as General Counsel at Robinhood before joining Airbase as our GC;
• Our most recent senior addition is Aneal Vallurupalli from Mattermost, who just started as our CFO.

With the market tailwinds, our amazing team, and comprehensive solutions, Airbase is delivering astonishing close rates (among the highest I’ve ever seen), exceptional gross and net retention, and heart-warming customer love. Quite simply, there is no mid-market solution even close!

Congrats to Thejo and the team at Airbase on the momentum and on the fundraise. We are honored to be your partners and excited for what’s next.