The funds raised will be used to continue growing Pleo’s already 17,000+ strong customer base as it aims to reach 1 million engaged users by the end of 2025. Pleo offers smart company cards and expense management for businesses across Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Spain, Ireland and the UK.
UK Fintech scale-up Pleo, which offers a simplified expense management tool and smart company cards, has just raised its Series C round totalling $150m (USD). „This is the all-time largest Series C raise for a Danish-headquarted business – and one of the biggest Series C rounds in European fintech – giving the company a Unicorn valuation of approximately $1.7bn,” according to the press release.
This Series C investment comes two years after Pleo’s Series B round, led by Stripes, which saw them raise $56m — previously the largest Series B round raised in Denmark to date. Prior to this, in 2018, Pleo raised its Series A round totalling $16m, which helped expand its solution across Europe. Today, Pleo operates in six markets across Denmark, UK, Ireland, Spain, Germany and Sweden.
Jeppe Rindom, Co-founder and CEO at Pleo, says: “We’re confident the partnerships, new and ongoing, will help us achieve our life-long mission to transform how businesses handle their spending, all while making their people feel valued at work. Our growth so far is a real testament to all our hard work, but also the 17,000+ customers who place trust in our product every day — it really shows we’re onto something here. Over the past six years, we’ve grown from an acorn of an idea to a growing team of over 330 people across six markets. The future is extremely bright as we gain our Unicorn status.”
Keri Gohman, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, says: „The future of work empowers employees with the tools they need to be effective, productive, and successful. Pleo understands this critical shift for modern companies toward employee centricity—providing workers with a fun-to-use spend management app that automatically tracks their corporate spending and generates expense reports, paired with the powerful tools businesses need to create full visibility and management of every penny spent.”
Merritt Hummer, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, says: „BCV invests in founders who aren’t afraid to tackle big problems, and Jeppe and Nicco saw a big challenge that employers faced—tracking all corporate spending and reconciling expenses back to the general ledger—and solved it with elegant technology that both employers and employees love.”
„Pleo is well positioned to become the dominant player in small business spend management, an $80B+ opportunity in Europe alone, and will only grow more essential to businesses as the company expands into bill payments in the near future.”
Bain Capital Ventures has recently invested in GoCardless. Last month, they also raised $1.3 billion to fund young startups and VC firms.
What will Pleo do with this investment?
The funds raised will be used to continue growing Pleo’s already 17,000+ strong customer base as it aims to reach 1 million engaged users by the end of 2025. Pleo will also continue to invest in its team, which currently stands at 330 people, while iterating its product offering, to help both growing and established businesses manage their company spending in a simplified yet efficient way.
In the past year, Pleo has launched various significant product features, including Bills, an invoice management system that removes the hassle from paying invoices, and Reimbursements (as part of Pocket), a centralised hub to keep track of the money owed between employees and the company. This investment will see further developments on features such as these as well as deepening their market offerings.
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Pleo is an out-of-the-box business spending solution that offers smart company cards and automated expense reports for employees, enabling them to buy the things they need for work while giving finance teams full control and visibility of all company spending. Pleo catches receipts on the go, automatically categorises expenses based on previous behaviour and eliminates the need to do manual expense reports.
Pleo was founded in Copenhagen in 2015 by fintech veterans Jeppe Rindom and Niccolo Perra, both serial entrepreneurs with years of experience building successful financial products. Today, Pleo has five European office locations (London, Stockholm, Berlin, Madrid and Copenhagen).
Banking 4.0 – „how was the experience for you”
„So many people are coming here to Bucharest, people that I see and interact on linkedin and now I get the change to meet them in person. It was like being to the Football World Cup but this was the World Cup on linkedin in payments and open banking.”
Many more interesting quotes in the video below:
