NewTech Friday: Yokoy - Addressing corporate spend in its entirety

What led to the creation of Yokoy?

We founded Yokoy in 2019 as a group of five. From our previous work experience, we all knew how tedious it is to manually prepare, review, approve and process all expenses, invoices and credit card transactions. I, for instance, was a CFO of a multinational company before Yokoy and dealt with corporate spending on a daily basis.

It is unimaginable how much manual work is involved in the accounts payable domain, making spend management also a significant cost driver: it costs a company an estimated $58 just to process a single expense report, and approximately $30 to manually process an invoice – not to mention the money lost by not reclaiming VAT, the risk of incorrect or fraudulent expenses/invoices, and card processing fees.

What surprised us most, was that there was no comprehensive solution that automated these spend management tasks, especially when it came to large, multinational companies. This realization set the stone rolling: we wanted to tackle this challenge and change the way that companies handle their spending.

Could you present Yokoy's offer?

We offer a comprehensive spend management solution that combines expense management, invoice processing, and the administration of intelligent corporate cards on a single intuitive platform. With the help of artificial intelligence, we then automate all the processes involved.

It all starts with the invoice, purchase order, receipt, or card transaction. Our platform not only extracts all the relevant data, but also validates it. Thus, expenses, invoices and card transactions are passing through the system completely automatically. The finance team only has to check outliers that are flagged by the system and can otherwise focus on tasks that create real value.

We are targeting medium and large global enterprises. Our solution integrates seamlessly into their complex system landscapes and business processes. Yokoy is also designed to enable a truly global approach to automating spend management, for example when customers have multiple legal entities, or are reclaiming VAT in different countries. 

What's coming next for Yokoy?

All signs are pointing towards sustained growth. We recently finished our Series B funding round with Sequoia Capital as a lead investor. We are also expanding – after starting out in Switzerland, we now have offices in Austria and Germany, and recently opened our European hub in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Right now, we are deep into evaluating new markets to expand to.

This is also in line with us building Yokoy as a global solution: some of our customers are active in 20 to 30 different countries, and they want to streamline their processes across all of their entities. With Yokoy, they get an all-in-one spend management solution that makes this possible.