Expense Robot raises CHF 1.7 million from Swisscom and SIX
Zurich – 2020, March 12 – The Swiss FinTech startup Expense Robot uses artificial intelligence
to automate your expense- and business credit card processes from the picture of a receipt all
the way to the compliance checks, the Finance booking, VAT input tax reclaim, archiving and
reimbursement. This allows managers and the Finance team to focus on exceptions and outliers
only. Max. 5 seconds of manual work per expense is their promise! To expand its mission,
Expense Robot has raised CHF 1.7 million in a seed round co-led by Swisscom Ventures and
SIX Group.
Experiencing the pain of manually preparing, tracking, checking, approving and processing
expenses first-hand, the five co-founders set out to start an expense revolution. The goal was
clear: maximum 5 seconds of manual work per expense and business credit card transaction.
and no shifting of work from the employee to the finance team. Manual work should also be
limited to special cases that cannot be validated by the AI. A company with about 150 expenseor
business credit card users can save an entire full-time position thanks to Expense Robot.
After the successful prototyping- and testing phase of the initial cloud-based expense
management service, Expense Robot went live with a first wave of customers in September
2019. Since then the team has already landed renowned global customers such as Swissquote,
Kägi, Ameropa or SkyCell.
Expense Robot’s vision is to leverage Artificial Intelligence to fully automate all expense- and
business credit card processes to save time and money, increase employee satisfaction, reduce
complexity and ensure compliance. Unlike traditional digital solutions, the company’s technology
simplifies the process for all expense management stakeholders – employees, managers and
the finance team – all the way up to booking it into the ERP system. The flexibility of the
technology further allows complex setups and thereby supports multi-legal entity, multi-currency
and rank-specific policies.
“There are many exciting features we have in store for the upcoming months”, says Devis Lussi,
Co-founder and CTO of Expense Robot, “in order to grow our team accordingly, we decided to
do a seed round.” The seed round was co-led by Swisscom Ventures and SIX with participation
from Angel investors like Gian Reto à Porta, Founder of Contovista and Myke Näf, Founder of
Doodle.
“Having Swisscom Ventures and SIX as lead-investors is a strong signal of the market’s interest
in our approach of digitizing the expense- and business credit card process end-to-end” says
Philippe Sahli, Co-founder and CEO of Expense Robot, “our goal is to revolutionize business
spending in general in order for our customers to focus on their daily business – imagine you
pay something on behalf of your company and within seconds get reimbursed on your bank
account while the correct entry with VAT is already in the financial system.”
“The experienced team behind Expense Robot convinced us that their platform can
revolutionize the expense and business credit card processes in Swiss companies and abroad“,
says Alexander Schlaepfer, investment partner at Swisscom Ventures, “we are excited to
support Expense Robot’s further growth in this underserved market.”
Link to the Press Release