Startup Tipalti Inc. today said that it has raised $150 million to widen the adoption of its namesake cloud service, which helps companies perform accounting tasks with less manual work.

The round values San Mateo, California-based Tipalti at more than $2 billion. It was led by Durable Capital Partners with participation from Greenoaks Capital and 01 Advisors, a relatively new fund co-founded by former Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo.

Tipalti’s platform focuses on automating one particular aspect of corporate accounting: accounts payable, or the process of paying external parties such as suppliers for goods and services. This task constitutes one of the most time-consuming parts of finance teams’ work. According to a study commissioned by Tipalti, about half of midsized to large companies spend around 500 person-hours a year on accounts payable chores, and 27% spend up to 1,040 hours.

The startup says its platform can automate about 80% of the manual work traditionally involved in the process. Tipalti can collect incoming invoices, extract the key financial details with the help of machine learning models and input the data into a company’s enterprise resource planning system. The processed invoice is then sent to the finance team for approval.

Beyond the core accounts payable workflow, Tipalti automates a number of related tasks using specialized tools built into its platform. The platform enables companies to create a branded web portal through which suppliers can submit invoices and has a feature called Detect for catching suspicious activity.

“The accounts payable automation space has an extremely large total addressable market with significant growth potential,” said Henry Ellenbogen, founder and managing partner of Durable Capital Partners. “We believe that Tipalti has the potential to become a much larger company within the midmarket space.”

The startup already has a significant market footprint, having processed $12 billion in transitions for customers since the beginning of 2020. Uber Technologies Inc., GitLab Inc. and Twitter are among the companies that use Tipalti’s platform to help with their accounting.

The new funding will partly go toward hiring more employees. Tipalti currently has a roughly 350-person workforce that it plans to grow by expanding the product, business development and customer service teams, as well as other parts of its operations.

In total, Tipalti has raised about $280 million from investors to date. 

Photo: Tipalti