Expense Robot raises CHF 1.7 million from Swisscom and SIX

The Swiss FinTech startup Expense Robot uses artificial intelligence to automate 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.

According to the start-up, a company with about 150 expense or business credit card users can save an entire full-time position thanks to Expense Robot. 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.

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.

“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.

“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.”

"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.”

(Press release / SK)

Picture: The co-founders of Expense Robot (f.l.t.r. Thomas Inhelder, Lars Mangelsdorf, Melanie Gabriel, Philippe Sahli, Devis Lussi). Expense Robot / Oliver Hochstrasser