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PayEm nabs $27M to ease companies budget and spend woes globally

Newly out of stealth mode and backed by $27 million in fresh funding, fintech startup PayEm is ready to make some noise.

Tel Aviv, Israel-based PayEm is on a mission to simplify non-payroll spending for businesses that operate globally. Toward that end, the company plans to dramatically ramp up hiring thanks to the $27 million — a $7 million seed round and a $20 million Series A round.

Pitango First and NFX led the seed round, with participation from LocalGlobe and Fresh Fund. Glilot+, the early growth fund of Glilot Capital Partners, led the Series A round.

“PayEm’s holistic platform has seen tremendous growth in such short time precisely because it solves a truly fundamental problem for employees, managers, and financial officers alike — the ongoing fragmentation in corporate financial tools,” Lior Litwak, managing partner of Glilot Capital and head of Glilot, said in a Sept. 1 announcement about the funding.

Without revealing specifics, PayEm says it is already generating millions of dollars in revenue. PayEm, founded in 2019, launched its platform in March 2020 — the same month that the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.

The PayEm platform automates a number of corporate finance processes, enabling professionals across a company’s global locations to smoothly handle budgeting and accounting tasks. This includes reimbursement, procurement, accounts payable and credit card processing.

PayEm’s technology also offers cross-border capabilities: Using PayEm, finance teams can send money in 130 currencies to over 200 territories in just one click. In that regard, PayEm opens up a “one-stop shop” for global monetary transactions, said Itamar Jobani, co-founder and CEO of PayEm.

PayEm competes in a B2B payment market estimated at $127 trillion. It targets globally active small businesses, midmarket companies and large enterprises as customers, with a particular emphasis on pre-IPO midmarket companies that employ a few hundred to a few thousand people. Clients include Fiverr, Jfrog and Next Insurance.

Jobani said his startup is capitalizing on the simultaneous rise of SaaS, remote work and global business expansion.

“Our platform enables employees and various departments to make their own spending decisions while offering centralized control and visibility for finance teams,” Jobani said in the funding announcement.

In an interview with FinLedger, Jobani said that in its quest to fuel growth, PayEm aims to boost the size of its workforce from the current 40 to 120 by mid-2022 and 180 by the end of next year. The company, with offices in Tel Aviv and New York City, will focus mostly on hiring sales and marketing professionals in the U.S., he said.

Despite a launch that was overshadowed by the pandemic, Jobani said PayEm is enjoying tremendous growth. In the second quarter of this year, the company’s revenue jumped 4x compared with the previous quarter, he said. Now that PayEm has collected $27 million in funding and is gearing up to expand its sales and marketing teams, the future looks “very promising,” Jobani said.

The future didn’t look so promising when the pandemic first emerged, though; however, Jobani said the global health crisis actually benefited PayEm by accelerating business advancements that already were in motion, he said. That includes the need for global teams working remotely to easily collaborate on corporate financial matters, such as tracking credit card spending.

Jobani said the global surge in B2B paytech innovation is “not stoppable,” as more and more executives adopt the mentality that keeping pace with global payments is imperative and that technology like PayEm’s is a must-have. Among those executives is the vice president of a company who recently shared with Jobani that it juggles myriad credit card vendors across its 30-office global footprint.

“It’s unbelievable,” Jobani said of that complex scenario, “and they have to do it because there aren’t solutions that were built for this.”

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