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Stampli, a provider of AI-powered accounts payable automation, today announced that it has raised $61 million in a Series D venture funding round led by funds managed by Blackstone, with the participation of existing investors Insight Partners, SignalFire, Bloomberg Beta, and NextWorld Capital. This latest funding round takes the total amount raised by the company to over $148 million.
Accounts Payable automation and B2B payments represent a massive and largely unpenetrated market. Put simply, every business has to pay bills, which means every business has an accounts payable function. Sizing the market opportunity, Deutsche Bank Research estimated in 2021 that AP automation and ePayments combined represent ~$70bn in US revenue opportunity, not including the international opportunity, which they estimated could be ~3-5x larger.
Launched in 2015, Stampli is one of the fastest-growing providers of accounts payable automation and ePayment services. In August alone, Stampli processed more than 1 million invoices totaling a collective value of more than $5 billion.
A model for AI in sensitive financial applications
Stampli’s 1,300 accounts payable automation customers trust its AI with invoice capture, expense allocation, approval routing, fraud detection, and more.
These activities are the final checkpoint before money is released, which means there’s zero tolerance for errors or hallucinations.
This safe and effective use of AI is significant because today’s CFOs feel immense pressure to embrace AI for faster workflows, lower costs, and fewer mistakes. But AI is infamous for issues with data security and unpredictable outcomes. Stampli’s success demonstrates that AI can succeed even in finance. Stampli also provides a blueprint for CFOs to maintain human validation of critical data as well as to ensure rank-and-file team members accept AI as a partner.
“Before we brought on Stampli, our AP team was nervous that the AI would be a threat rather than an asset to their jobs,” says Amanda Brown, Controller of Wenspok Companies, a $150M+ Wendy’s franchisee that operates 67 restaurant locations in 10 states. “But with Billy the Bot now performing such time-consuming manual tasks as coding invoices to the correct general ledger accounts, the AP team has seen their responsibilities shift to projects that add much greater value to the business. Today, we think of Billy as a team member, not an AI. Honestly, we love Billy the Bot and frequently refer to it by name.”
Stampli’s core promise: Implementation without disruption
The efficiency and cost benefits of accounts payable automation are widely known. For CFOs, the overriding concern in choosing a provider is minimizing the disruption of implementation to existing processes and the ERP systems, and ensuring the fastest time to value.
Stampli’s solution is designed specifically to eliminate implementation risk. Stampli builds its ERP integrations in-house to support the full range of native functionality, allowing customers to implement without reworking their ERP, changing their existing processes, or engaging expensive consultants; in addition, it reduces deployment time to days instead of months. Stampli’s adaptability makes it especially well-suited for complex multi-entity corporate structures, highly regulated industries such as healthcare, and businesses that have already automated their AP but are disappointed with their current provider.
“Stampli has reduced our invoice processing time by 75%, which has a strategic impact on cash flow management,” says Brown. “With a more accurate picture of our operating costs, Wenspok leadership can schedule major operational projects with confidence in budgeting and timing of cash flow requirements. At the tactical level, Stampli has created efficiencies across the board — not just on the AP team, but for all our operating team members outside of finance that we consult to validate the bills we receive. The average invoice approval time has dropped from 16 days to 2 days, and we think we will bring that number down even further.”
Stampli offers its fast implementation for more than 70 different ERPs, including systems from Sage, Oracle, Microsoft, QuickBooks, SAP, Acumatica, IBM and many others. Beyond Accounts Payable, Stampli offers an integrated suite of FinTech products, including Stampli Credit Card and Stampli Direct Pay.
Blackstone’s focus on AI and strategic finance
This investment in Stampli highlights Blackstone’s thematic focus on investing in businesses driving the digitization of the economy, as well as those enabling and benefitting from AI adoption. In Stampli, Blackstone sees a company that is well positioned at the intersection of these trends.
With stakes in more than 230 companies and 12,600 real estate assets, Blackstone uniquely understands the strategic necessity to automate legacy processes with the benefit of AI technology, and it is excited to partner with Stampli as it continues to work to ensure that its portfolio is equipped with the right tools and technologies needed to succeed.
Additionally, Blackstone has been an industry pioneer in its commitment to invest significant resources to streamline procurement across its portfolio and then garner strategic insights across spend categories from that data. Stampli stands to benefit from Blackstone’s reach and scale as it builds a best-in-class offering.
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