Coupa’s fundraising blitz draws $40M for expense-tracking in the cloud

Does the prospect of streamlining your invoicing process sound sexy enough for tens of millions in funding to you? It did for investors of Coupa, a corporate procurement company that just closed a fundraising blitz with $40 million in its fifth round funding after just 48 hours.

Founded in 2006, the company provides a cloud-based system to streamline and cut down on corporate waste by making it easier to track expenses, invoicing, and other payroll processes by enabling employees to enter data through their mobile phones.

Headed by Rob Bernshteyn, the company promises scenarios like this: Employees looking to expense their dinners could take a picture of their receipt at a restaurant and have all of the data about the dinner entered into an expense report. Meanwhile, companies could monitor which restaurants, hotels, and transportation services are seeing use to reach out to negotiate discounts.

Having worked for many large corporations such as Siebel Systems and McKinsey & Company for almost 20 years, Bernshteyn’s inspiration for Coupa was borne out of day-to-day frustrations.

“The companies weren’t doing a great job of managing the way the company spends money on the goods and services I needed to do my job,” he said.

Bernshteyn plans to use the latest round of funding to refine and expand his company’s core suite of services, responding to customer demand.

“We’ve been really aggressively investing in research and development,” Bernshteyn said. “We’ve actually doubled our engineering team in the last nine months.” He wants to double the team again within the next year.

The CEO also plans to expand around the world, riding their successes in certain international markets.

“We had a lot of success in Europe now, quite a bit in Latin America as well,” Bernshteyn said. Most recently, the big French health-care company Sanofi signed on for Coupa’s services. The CEO said Coupa planned to put more people in both Europe and Latin America while also expanding to Asia.

Meritech Capital Partners led this round of investments, with participation from Icon Ventures, Northgate Ventures, and all current investors. Now with a total of $87.5 million in investments, Coupa is a rising star the procurement industry.

Coupa isn’t the only one in the business of ironing out corporate spending inefficiencies, facing competitors in the field from traditional enterprise resource-planning suites to other cloud-based services like Hubwoo. However, Bernshteyn believes that investor interest stems from the company’s integration of analytics and spending-tracking. He also noted another factor may be that the 7-year-old company has been “prudent” with its own spending — managed, of course, by their own software.

Coupa’s client list spans many corporate industries, including companies such as Coca-Cola, Toyota, and Pandora.