Grofin’s AI-based fundraising SaaS expands further into America and Asia

Cash management – ​​keeping track of who needs to pay invoices and what’s done – can make or break a business. Now, a startup building SaaS software that helps finance departments manage this smarter is announcing some funding after seeing strong demand.

Grofin, a Singapore and San Francisco-based fintech startup that provides SaaS for finance departments to help track and collect payments and manage the invoice process, has raised $7.5 million in Series A funding. The company plans to use this funding to expand. in the US and Asia and to double down by building more AI-based technology to expand the platform. Next: A forecasting tool that predicts trends “based on past payment behavior and current recipient data from Growfin.”

Singapore’s SWC Global led the funding with participation from existing backers 3one4 Capital and angel investors. The latest funding comes on the back of 8x growth in client numbers over the past 12 months, during which Grofin helped clients raise more than $1 billion in accounts receivable (AR). Groffin has now raised a total of $9 million, and is not disclosing a valuation.

Grofin is entering a mature market rather than the current economic climate and the pressure it is putting on all businesses.

According to a recent Gartner report, 78% of CFOs have invested in automation and cash flow visibility technology. But while they’re willing to pay for tools that help them plan for the future, when it comes to current accounts, many still rely on spreadsheets, exposing the gap between having visibility into a company’s financial situation and knowing how that might look in a week, month or year.

Grofin’s first product was an AI-powered finance CRM, an intelligent bridge product that told finance, sales and customer success teams how to handle invoices in one place to handle customer interactions during the payment and cash collection processes. Receiving departments can sometimes do better if they join forces and expertise with those who manage most of the customer relationship before this point. (And of course, a smoother experience can lead to more sales in the future.)

Instead of building an AR automation product, the company built a financial CRM that not only automates financial accounts workflows, but also real collaboration capabilities and financial CRM for sales, customer success, and the customers themselves in one place. same information).

That early push toward more financial visibility was captured. Grofin’s early adopters currently rank B2B technology companies in SaaS, AdTech, Logistics Tech and EdTech, and it now has 25 customers including Intercom, Fourkeys, MindTickle, LeadSquared and Fast Dry Recovery, including Grofin’s founder and CEO, Aravind Gopala. He told TechCrunch. It’s primarily marketed to customers who are finance teams, although, as you might imagine, revenue-generating teams like sales and customer success are also users of the service. He says the startup has now reached $400,000 in annual recurring revenue since launching 12 months ago.

Intercom uses Growfin to automate and track collection activities, integrates with NetSuite, Zuora and Salesforce and provides real-time visibility to finance leaders, Gopalan explained. “We helped them reduce their cash collection cycle from 91 days to 59 days in 5 months and increase their collection efficiency by 35%,” he said.

Locus, a logistics technology startup that uses Grofin to collect payments faster, improved its teams’ productivity by 60% in ten months, says Gopalan.

Founded in 2021 by Gopalan and co-founders Raja Jayaram, they told TechCrush that they had meetings with more than 200 financial leaders around the world while the product was still in development. The surprising message is that finance teams are dissatisfied with legacy spreadsheet-based systems and the expensive prospect of a solution to time-consuming workloads while hiring more people.

“Managing invoices and collecting payments are often complex and become more complex as companies grow. Despite the advancements of ERPs and CRMs like Salesforce and Netsuite, I’ve found that 90% of finance teams still manage their AR (accounts receivable) processes outside of these tools, mostly through spreadsheets or in-house. databases,” said Gopalan. “This collaboration-first approach offers better efficiency and greater transparency, and creates trusted relationships between customers and businesses to collect B2B payments faster.”

It employs 40 people and plans to double its headcount this year in the US, where most of its clients are located, as well as in Asia.

Grofin’s competitors include HighRadius, Upflow, Tesorio, YayPay and Gaviti. ERP service providers are indirect competitors, Gopalan said.

“Grofin’s AI-powered system is poised to disrupt how businesses collect their invoices sitting on top of ERP systems like NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics,” said Tak Lee Koh, founding partner of SWC Global. Finance teams can plug into Grofin to get a deep, wide-eyed look at their financial security with real-time cash flow efficiency and forecasting.