Spend intelligence platform Spendkey raises £358k in pre-seed funding

Spend intelligence platform Spendkey can today announce that it has raised £358,000 in pre-seed funding from early-stage investors Fuel Ventures and Scalebridge Capital, as well as several angel investors. Emerging from stealth mode, Spendkey will use the funding to continue its mission to transform vast amounts of data into tangible spending insights, accelerating and automating decision-making in the process. 

The Spendkey platform provides CFOs, CIOs, and CPOs at large multinationals with a single, clear view of their spending across their organisation, and delivering 99.5% accuracy within 10 days. This equips them with the necessary insights to make more informed spending decisions without lengthy backend processes. Business spending that would normally take a human 200 days to manually analyse can be processed by the Spendkey platform in a matter of minutes.

Co-founders Alex Grundy and Akshay Upadhye founded Spendkey in 2020, having identified a significant gap in the market while working together at a strategic consulting firm. The lack of granular and intelligent insights available when it came to business operating expenses – with little to no automation – led to them developing the AI-powered platform.

By enabling businesses to make more accurate decisions, allocate resources, and model for different scenarios, on average, Spendkey customers can identify 12.5% potential cost savings across the board. The company’s B2B platform has an extremely high degree of accuracy, and costs only a fraction of the price of other alternatives in the space.

Spendkey's success to date is evidenced by the fact that it has already processed £30bn worth of transactions and grown 500% year-on-year. Its user-friendly platform has displaced the competition and won praise from big-ticket customers across multiple sectors, including pharmaceuticals, financial services, retail, professional services, and manufacturing companies.

The global spend analytics market is forecast to reach $7.63 billion USD by 2028, driven by factors such as increasing demand for cost reduction, the rising need for real-time data analytics, and growing adoption of automation technologies. Aligning with this broader market growth, Spendkey plans to use the investment to expand into more global markets, hire a dedicated sales team, strengthen its marketing activities, and introduce new best-in-class features to the platform.

Alex Grundy, Co-founder of Spendkey, said: “Working closely with our customers and partners while bootstrapping has established a strong foundation for Spendkey. Our talented team, coupled with a powerful, scalable AI can solve complex data challenges and create cost reduction opportunities, positioning us in a market poised for high growth.

This investment is the next step on Spendkey’s journey, and it will provide us with the financial resources we need to enhance our platform's user-friendly workflows and carbon reduction features. We’re thrilled to partner with Fuel Ventures and Scalebridge Capital to continue our mission to provide tangible spending insights, accelerating and automating decisions.

Alexander Breeden, Senior Associate, Fuel Ventures, said: “What excites us with Spendkey is their ability to leverage AI to transform financial spending data and give businesses greater transparency over their spending at a granular level.

It will empower businesses to make intelligent decisions around their spending, putting them on the front foot, and enabling them to proactively make more informed decisions over their finances.”

Jamie Su, Managing Director, Scalebridge Capital, said: “At Scalebridge, we firmly believe that the future of industries lies in intelligent automation. In today’s business environment, where improving justifying and optimising costs are major business priorities, market incumbents have consistently failed to deliver the necessary insights.

Thanks to the Spendkey platform’s capacity for leveraging AI, we believe that the business is a category leader in the next generation of spend analytics. We were impressed by the Spendkey team’s ability to provide a single source of truth for business spending data and execute on the company’s mission at speed. 

Alex and Akshay bring extensive domain experience and insights, along with a clear vision for the future of spending and procurement automation. We’re excited for the next stage of our work together.”