Podcast 310: Thejo Kote of Airbase

The expense management space is heating up. While it has not garnered the same headlines as other fintech categories, there has been a lot more attention focused on it in the last couple of years. Earlier this year we saw Bill.com acquire Divvy for several billion dollars and companies like Brex are unicorns many times over. But hardly anyone is focused on the middle market companies, those with 50 to 1,000 employees.

Our next guest on the Fintech One•On•One podcast is Thejo Kote, the CEO and founder of Airbase. They have a differentiated offering bringing together bill payments, corporate cards and reimbursements within a single system that integrates deeply with the major accounting systems. And they focus solely on middle market companies.

In this podcast you will learn:

  • What attracted Thejo to the expense management space.
  • Why businesses are usually 6-7 weeks behind in expense management.
  • The three different products Airbase is offering today.
  • Why they target mid-market companies (50-1,000 employees).
  • Their approach to product development.
  • How they integrate with the major accounting systems.
  • How Airbase is different from the others in the space.
  • How their latest funding round came together so quickly (see this TechCrunch piece).
  • Details of their business model and how they make money.
  • The growth and scale they are at today.
  • Thejo’s vision for the business.

This episode of the Fintech One on One Podcast is brought to you by LendIt Fintech Nexus, an in-person event focused exclusively on face-to-face meetings happening in Miami on September 1-2.

Download a PDF of the transcription of Podcast 310 – Thejo Kote.

Welcome to the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, Episode No. 310. This is your host, Peter Renton, Chairman and Co-Founder of LendIt Fintech.

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Before we start this episode, I want to tell you about a brand new event from LendIt Fintech. Fintech Nexus, the Dealmaker Summit, will be the first major in-person fintech event of the past 18 months, a hand-curated audience of venture capitalists, bankers, fintechs, and debt investors will be meeting face-to-face at an event 100% focused on doing deals. It will be happening in Miami on September 1st and 2nd. You can apply to join and find out more at lendit.com

Peter Renton: Today on the show, I’m delighted to welcome Thejo Kote, he is the Founder and CEO of Airbase. Now, Airbase is an interesting company, they’re a spend management platform for small and medium-sized companies and they really are solving a problem that exists to this day of these disparate systems that are controlling expenses for businesses today, something he experienced firsthand at his previous company which was the impetus for starting this company which we get into in some depth. 

We talk about the real problem today, how Airbase is addressing it, what differentiates them from some of the other players in the space and, you know, the fact that it is a really hot space right now, there’s a lot of activity with some of the other players. Thejo also makes it clear what actually differentiates them. We talk about the latest funding round they did which was very recent and how that happened, that came together so quickly and we talk about what the future holds for Airbase. It was a fascinating conversation, hope you enjoy the show.

Welcome to the podcast, Thejo!

Thejo Kote: Thank you for having me, Peter.

Peter: My pleasure. So, let’s get started by giving the listeners a little bit of background. I know that this isn’t your first rodeo so tell us a little bit about what you’ve done in your career before Airbase.

Thejo: I’m originally from India, grew up there and, you know, I moved to the US in 2009, right, and I had worked in the US for about four/four and a half years before that most of the time at a startup because I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my life working in a startup. My career in a large company, fairly obvious to me that that wasn’t something I enjoyed, so worked in a startup to learn what it’s all about, and then eventually, I wanted to make my way to Silicon Valley. Now, the startup ecosystem was really dynamic in India, but it wasn’t the case in 2008/2009 and I felt I had come to Silicon Valley to live that dream of starting technology companies so I did and the best way to do that was to come to grad school out here so did that in 2009. 

But, as luck would have it, soon after I graduated there was an opportunity for me to start my previous company, it happened sooner than I expected it would, but it was based on some research that my Co-Founder in my previous company and I were working on in grad school. I saw an opportunity to commercialize it and things like that and that ended up being Automatic, my previous company, which was a very different domain than Airbase. We were building a connected car platform and so we were probably, you know, two or three years too early in going after the technology-enabled automotive use cases that are more accepted, I guess, in the financing community now. 

Every step of that journey with Automatic was a little harder than it probably should have been and, ultimately, you know, it was all good. It worked out well, we built a good business, we ultimately sold it to Sirius XM in 2017, and because it was part of that journey that taught me all about the problem I’m trying to solve now with Airbase around how businesses, spend money and manage all of the non-payroll spending that happens in the business. It’s a pain point that I lived pretty much every day, I learned about it, but anyway that’s the end of the high-level overview, happy to jump into some of the details of what I learned and why Airbase if you’re interested.

Peter: Yeah, for sure. Let’s do that because I am curious about like the expense management space. Back in 2017, it wasn’t as sexy, shall we say, as it is now, it feels like there’s a lot of activity in the space, but what was it that you felt like you really…you know, there were players back then, but what was it you felt was missing, what attracted you to it?

Thejo: Yeah. The foundational problem, for me, was when you think about how a business spends money, it happens in too many places, right. We can have a much longer conversation about why the market even evolved that way. Even today, for the most part, the status quo is…..of course, segments matter in these businesses, you can’t paint a broad brush. But, mostly for small businesses and mid-market businesses, if you think about how they manage all the non-payroll dollars that they spend, there are multiple systems, right. You have the corporate card system where a bunch of money is spent and then not everyone accepts card payments so you receive invoices and there’s an AP system or a bill payment system like a Bill.com that you’re using to ingest invoices and create those bills, get approval, make easier check payments, those sort of things, that’s the bills payment system. 

And then, the boys are spending their own money, they come back and say, hey, pay me back or reimburse me and dollar separate systems like Expensify, I don’t know, expense reimbursement of products, right. So, those are kind of the three primary systems that every company has to put in place and that happens pretty early in the life cycle of the company when you have 15,20,25 employees, you have these systems and we were in the same boat. As you’re growing, as you’re scaling, you need a little bit more process and you want people to ask before they spend money. 

And so, how does that happen? That happens in a slack conversation, that happens in email conversations, some enterprising finance person says, oh, this is too big for that, I don’t have an audit trail of how decisions were made so I pull out Google Form together or I’ll introduce a basic ticketing process for people to ask before they spend money. So, any ad hoc kind of systems and processes, but on the tail end of it, it is incredibly painful for financing/accounting people as part of a monthly close process to get all this data from all these different systems and reconcile all of these different systems through which money is flowing. And, it’s a massive amount of manual low value work that isn’t a good use of their time and that was frustrating. 

The other business kind of perspective…the frustrating part to me also was that none of the budget owners, the people who are accountable for ultimately running the business and spending money on behalf of the business, they don’t have visibility into what am I spending, right.  This is the way modern businesses operate in that you have a budget and you’re trying to spend it throughout the month, you don’t really have visibility into how much have I actually spent because all of these are going out the door to different places. When you are trying to make a decision on what can I spend this money on, can I commit to this, you’re winning it, basically. 

So, for the most part, you have to wait till the end of the month, you’ve to wait for the accounting team to pull data from all these different systems, bring it all together into your accounting software or general ledger then your financial statements come out say a week to ten days after the end of the month and then companies go through a budgeting, budget versus actuals analysis process. And then, people are going to get the report card two weeks into the next month saying hey, you went over budget last month and what do you do now, it’s too late. So, that’s how modern businesses operate like six/seven weeks behind at all times in terms of your visibility to how am I doing when it comes to spend like the holy button and that becomes a bigger and bigger problem as you scale as a business. 

There’s a lot of slack and a lot of lack of discipline in terms of how you spend money, it’s hard to hold people accountable and there are no good rules, there are no good workflows and processes and that’s basically what my frustration all along and, obviously I was not solving that problem. I was building a different company so I went into my ideas notebook to look into, you know, when I had the time, when I finally did after we sold Automatic.  That’s the problem, how we solve at Airbase today which is to bring all of those different elements of how non-payroll spend happens, the entire set of workflows and life cycles. 

From the moment an employee thinks I want to spend money, how do they request improvement on workflows happen, how do all that internal collaboration and decision making process happen, you know, how do you bring that into the platform, how do you capture that audit trail so that you can attach it to every dollar that you used even if it happens that two years in the future that’s on the front end. And then, when you decided to spend the money, how do you help with the payments. Payments shouldn’t happen in different systems just because they use different payment rates, right. 

How do you bring all of the payment rates, it could be your card rates, Visa, Mastercard, it could be your ACH, check, wires, international wires, how are you going to bring all of them into one system. And finally, as the money is leaving the door, how do you then take care of accounting operations, all of it in one system? Automate away, a big chunk of it in terms of how it’s all recorded in the GL, bring all of that into one platform, that’s the 10X improvement that you can deliver to the market compared to kind of these independent siloed fragmented solutions that the market has had to deal with, so far. That’s kind of the way we approach the solution to the problem. 

That was the hypothesis in 2017 when I started working on Airbase, that is the right way to solve the problem, that is where the market is going, but as it turns out, thankfully, that has been validated at this point. I am confident that will be the default expectation of the market. I don’t see why in a few years, as this new category of spend management…..at least in the small and mid-market segments, it’s a new category as it becomes more prevalent and people are informed about it. I don’t think I can get up in the morning and do what do if people would look at this kind of an offering and still say, no, I prefer having five different systems where I’ll manage spend, right. That almost never happens and so that’s how I think about it.

Peter: Okay, okay. So, let’s just dig in a little bit. I’m on your website here and you talk about three products which are Bill Payments, Corporate Cards and Reimbursements. You said one platform, is this sort of a menu or when someone comes along and wants to use your services, do you sell them one by one, do you sell them all three, how are they integrated?

Thejo: We don’t force people to sign up for everything from the get-go and so we’re definitely happy to work with people where they are, but more than half of new customers that we add, they absolutely buy into the benefits of having everything in a single platform. That is a primary motivator for them to shift away from all of the point solutions that they have and to move to Airbase. They see the value, they see the benefit of having a real-time reporting of every dollar that leaves the door for the finance/accounting team, for the rest of the team, the ease of reconciliation and one system to reconcile against for all non-payroll dollars against the GL, cuts down the monthly close time by half….all those things are of use to them and they say, great, I’m just going to go for all of them at the same time.

But, sometimes people don’t, right, because they are in the market for a specific solution and that’s how they find us, that’s how they run in our process and they’re like I just want avail of the Bills Payment solution, I want a better expense reimbursement solution. We are more than happy to give that, right, and so we’re not going to force them to sign an all or nothing with us because it’s an opportunity for us to grow with that customer later. So, even if they start by only using say the Bills Payment aspect of our product, we give them free access to the other areas at a limited level so they can experience the power of having everything in a single platform and hey, that’s an opportunity for us to continue to grow with that customer. That’s how we think about it and that’s how we approach our go-to-market kind of strategy.

Peter: So, who is the target exactly? Are you talking about businesses between like ten employees and 500, are you going after large corporates as well, I mean, what’s the sweet spot?

Thejo: That’s a good question because segmentation really matters and there is quite a bit of noise in the space as of this recording, but we really target mid-market companies, right, because, in my view, that’s the most underserved part of the market. My definition of mid-market is say 100 to 1,000 employees and maybe even 50 to 1,000 employees, that’s who I think is the most underserved and we focus on that market because that’s the market that really suffers from the pain of having many different silos and fragmented solutions. Look, if you’re a 20/15, 20-employee company, 10-employee company, yes, you need a corporate card, yes your need to pay your bills and do some reimbursements, but the amount of money being spent, the number of transactions that happen, they’re not that large.

So, the pain of dealing with fragmented solutions isn’t as acute, but as you start growing, 100 employees, 200 employees, 300 employees, that pain becomes really acute in having so many different systems and the sheer coordination problem of having people in the business jumping into different systems to do different things, training them to jump into different systems to do different things, all these things are becoming much more complicated, right, and so, that’s the underserved market that we focus on so we tend to think of us as a mid-market focused company. 

There are other companies that are trying to do similar things in terms of consolidating these different elements for the lower end of the market, the really small customers. Look, spend management has existed in the enterprise segment for a while, right, so there’s a company called Coupa which does spend management, SAP Ariba….there are a few big players in the enterprise segment, but the mid-market has always been very underserved and that’s who we are targeting.

Peter: Okay. So then, I’d love to get your sense of your approach to product development. Are you doing this like….is this a close collaboration with your customers, do you sort of see the need and go and build it yourself? What is your approach to product development?

Thejo: Before I started working on Airbase, I had a hypothesis about what the problem was, I kind of lived the pain point. Ultimately, I am an accountant, I don’t do that job every single day so I took my hypothesis to a few dozen controllers, accounting managers, VPs of Finance, CFOs, folks like that and I had like dozens of conversations which obviously made me a lot smarter and I learned a lot more about the problem. But, long story short, it kind of validated my hypothesis on what the pain is and the fact that okay, this is a big pain, there’s a shift happening in this market of how you could start consolidating all the different elements. That’s a big opportunity and a big market and that’s what’s given me conviction that okay, I can go spend another 10/12 years of my life building out a company. That’s what I started with, but at this point people are building exactly what our customers are asking for. 

Our customer base is large enough that they’ll drive the roadmap for the most part, we are actively listening to customers. Part of the unique thing about our product development which you have to do as you go into larger companies, mid-market enterprise and larger companies is you have to deeply, deeply understand the work that your target customer does, right. So, what is it that you do everyday, where are the opportunities to improve the workflows? We think of us, primarily, as a software workflow product, right, yes, we are also a fintech company, we embed payments into those software workflows and part of what makes for a 10x solution is by bringing together software workflows and payments and we do that. 

But, first and foremost, we’re a workflow company, we deeply understand how does information flow inside the business, what are the manual tasks that are happening in the business, how does collaboration communication happen inside the business and how can you review the inefficiencies that…because there are lots of them. You know, spending money is inherently a collaborative exercise in the business, right, and having many different systems to do that is painful in lots of ways and so we’d like to dig deep and understand every one of those elements and we keep talking. At this point, the majority, 95%, of what we build in any quarterly planning process ends up being a prioritized list of what customers are asking for so we’re in the happy position of being able to do that.

Peter: Let’s talk about the accounting systems because…I mean, obviously, you’re not accounting software, these all has to integrate into some of the major systems out there. Can you tell us sort of….I presume you work with all the big ones, but how are you doing that integration?

Thejo: It’s all API doing integrations, it’s a lot of work, right. Right now, we support five of the major GLs which are on the lower end of the market, so say the 50 to 200/250-employee companies that we target, the most common legacy systems we see are QuickBooks Online, Quickbooks Desktop and Xero, right, and we have integrations for all of them. And then, mid-market, upper mid-market, the two biggest ones are NetSuite and Intacct, we have strong integrations with them and we’re kind of certified partners and all that good stuff. But, building those of native integrations, right, literally, we have a large team of engineers who are building against those APIs, that’s a core part of the value proposition that we offer, a seamless integration into the General Ledger and even automation in a lot of cases.

How do we make sure that as transactions are happening on the system, as money is being spent on the system what percentage of those transactions can we directly categorize and record in the General Ledger without an accountant having to be involved at all, right, and do it properly, do it correctly. That’s kind of an important number that we care about. So, to do that, to deliver on that promise of automation of accounting and seamless workflows and recording information in the GL, we’ve got to go invest in building those deep integrations. The larger the company gets, from NetSuite and Intacct especially, there are lots of these custom functionalities that those General Ledgers systems have and that’s where the value comes in, right. 

So, can you go do those very custom integrations into a system like NetSuite? Just to give you an example that maybe the non-accountants will not care about is if a payment is a pre-payment for something you’re paying over a year, right, so the specific way you have to go and amortize it over four months, the common thing that most systems do is that you spend the money in a system and you make the entry normally into the General Ledger, the accountant has to remember to go into the General Ledger and set it up correctly for amortizations in NetSuite, if they forget, they booked it incorrect, right. 

We have a deep integration with NetSuite where you can set it up inside of NetSuite in terms of how you want to amortize it, but when we record it in NetSuite, we set up all the things correctly in NetSuite so the amortization happens. So, there are a bunch of those kinds of examples where ….it’s not easy, you have to go deep system by system and build that deep integration from the GL of the company that we work with and Airbase and that’s a big part of what we do.

Peter: Right, right, okay. So, as I mentioned, expense management is actually a pretty hot space right now. You just had Divvy being acquired by Bill.com for a huge amount of money, you’ve got Brex and Ramp that are raising big rounds of large valuations, what is it about Airbase that is different from some of those aforementioned companies?

Thejo: Yeah. I would start digging into segmentation and some of those things, that’s where it starts and becomes more of a pattern. Bill.com has started to lead in the small business brokers company, I mean, they have about 100,000 customers and I think they’re almost an accidental mid-market company in that. The mid-market is so underserved that a lot of companies, they’ll start using Bill.com and they continue using them as mid-market customers because, well, there’s no other option in the market. Primary focus is when small business think they’ve got a good fit from that perspective also because they go up to this mainstream businesses, really small businesses, and Brex and Lance are similar. 

For the most part, all of those companies that you mentioned, their customer base…if you just look at their customer base, not that I have like deep inside insight, but from everything they talk about in public and numbers, it’s fairly obvious that the vast majority are very small customers, less than 20 employees, less than 50 employees. That’s fine, there is a problem there that, right, that is a $6 Million…..very small businesses out there, you can sell to them, build a very good business and you’re focused on a slightly different segment, right. So, we’re focused on the mid-market and the analogy I think about is look at this, we were just talking about General Ledger systems, why is it you have QuickBooks and Xero in the lower end, you have NetSuite and Intacct in the mid-market and you have SAP and Oracle in the enterprise. You can pick the top two players in every segment, why is the market segmented like that. 

Because this is the problem, that is one of the core hypotheses for us in the spend management category that is getting created in the lower end of the market and the mid-market, but it is a complex enough problem that one player can’t be all things to all people. You’ve got to pick, you’ve got to pick the category you’re going to solve and then you have to go deep and then you have to try to win that category and you’re focused on the mid-market, you’ve always been focused on the mid-market. I’ve always been talking about this problem as a spend management problem and the problem of consolidation of all non-payroll dollars and a bunch of these other players, they started off as corporate cards and then as of a few months ago, they’re also starting to talk about spend management because I would like to think we have done our part in evangelizing the bigger opportunity and the bigger prize and that is not just about corporate cards. 

And so, so glad it’s happening, but still even if all these other players choose to become spend management companies, serving the needs of very small businesses, it’s a different ballgame than serving the needs of mid-market companies with the breadth and depth and surface area of the product that you need. Definitely, a very interesting space to be in and big shifts happening in terms of customer expectation in the market and a huge market. I’m not surprised that there are players raising money and going after it.

Peter: Right, right. And you also raised money yourself. I’ve read in TechCrunch earlier, probably last month now, but you raised a round very quickly led by Menlo Ventures. Tell us about that process and how it came together so quickly.

Thejo: We’ve always been very fortunate to have a lot of inbound interest from investors and every round I raised, prior to this one was preempted. I was not really in the market to raise the money, but it was kind of preempted by good investors so we took it and kept going. But, this was around……yeah, there were already a bunch of people had been reaching out and given how I noticed the market was heating up, the original plan was this…we had most of the $30 odd Million that we had raised in the bank and there was no need for us to go raise money. The original plan was to hit sometime next year, we’ll go think about raising money, we’ll optimize (garbled) the plan we had this year, that was the plan. 

But, given the kind of funding rounds and those kinds of things that happened in the space, it became clear to me that this is not a market right now in the space that was rewarding capital efficiency and so we had to make a statement. Part of why we chose to do the round was to show that we could, to show the momentum that we had and we wanted to project that to the outside world. That was a big part of the goal and the motivation and because there was quite a bit of demand, we were in the fortunate position of basically being able to raise our hand and say, hey, we will raise a round. We had conversations with a few very good firms and we ultimately decided to go with Menlo Ventures and got done very quickly because, again, big market, big opportunity. I think we have a differentiated kind of opinion about how the space continues to evolve and that’s how it came together.

Peter: This is a SaaS business model, right, people are…..just paying you like a monthly fee to use your offerings, is that how you do it?

Thejo: Both, actually. So, this is one other way in which we differ from other players in the market and, finally, because we go up to large accounts, right, where mid-market customers, they want a partner for the long term. It’s not as much of a transactional relationship for them, they want the support, they want a neck to wring when something goes wrong. This is a mission critical system, how do I spend money as a business and so we also offer them breadth and depth of functionality that a company that has 300,400,500 employees or more needs and so we are absolutely able to charge for the software and customers see the ROI so they pay the subscription fee that we charge for software. But, the good news is, as a side effect of customers using the platform, there are financial services, revenue opportunities for us also so it’s not like we don’t make money on that side and we do so it’s a mix of both for us.

Peter: Okay. So, can you give us a sense of the scale you guys are at like number of employees, I don’t know if you can share number of customers, whatever you can share about the scale and the growth that you’ve been experiencing.

Thejo: The team is growing quickly. We are a globally distributed team, always been one even before the pandemic, we have employees in ten countries right now, we have about 125 I think at last count. We’re adding a few employees every week at this point, we expect to be north of 200 employees by the end of the year. More than half the team right now is part of development, again, large surface area of product and we’re actually going to double, triple down on that, keep our multi-quarter lead that we already have in terms of serving customers in that segment of hiring on the go-to-market side very aggressively. 

So, all of that is happening and so because the numbers are reflecting that, we are doubling ARR every six months, that’s been happening for a while now. 

And, yes, at some point that might slow down, so far, it’s going really well. Transaction volume, I think we are approaching a couple of billion dollars of annualized transactions, volume of payments flowing through the platform, that continues to grow very quickly, grew about seven times year over year from last year to this year and we’re projecting a similar kind of growth from this year to next year if you look at it year over year on an annualized basis. 

So, all the numbers are going in the right direction and so we feel very good about the direction into which things are heading and now, it’s just a matter of putting our heads down and executing and focusing on good customers and not getting very distracted by the noise.

Peter: So, last question. I’m curious about where you’re taking this. As you’ve been talking, I’ve been thinking about a number of different ways you could take this, you know, there’s, obviously, the credit side of the business. I mean, I’m curious about, are you going to remain in this sort of software play with, you know, a bit of payments activity happening or what’s your vision?

Thejo: We don’t think of ourselves as a lender, right, and we are actually in the process of partnering with banks and we don’t want to compete with banks too. I don’t want to be in the corporate card issuing game. We do that, why, because apart from the big pieces that we have is you have to consolidate all non-payroll spend, you shouldn’t have many different systems. Consolidate all spend in one system, but a sub-thesis Airbase always had is that the corporate card as a product, it’s a software workflow product, it is not the product that we think of it as today which is a piece of plastic, you put it in an envelope, you send it to employees, they spend money, end of the month, you get the finance team the statement.. 

That’s not the corporate card of the future, it is going to be a software workflow product that is deeply embedded in the decision of how the business spends money, the controls that are necessary, the accounting that has to happen as money is spent in those cards. It’s going to be a software workflow product and we started issuing our own cards because…well, how else will you showcase that thesis, right, here’s what you can do when a corporate card becomes a software product. But, long term, I really have no interest in participating in the corporate card wars, I happen to think it’s a race to the bottom and you can’t just focus on cash back and rewards and the size of the line of credit that you provide as the only differentiators. 

The differentiators have to be, in my view, is deeply understanding the work that finance and accounting do so, yeah, we’re always going to double down. So, we’re in the process of partnering with other banking partners and major card issuers now that we’ve shown that that thesis is good and the market actually believes in that and also the customers are demanding that. Now that that has happened, there’s a lot of good traction in terms of working with other issuers and, of course, that lends itself to our business model, right. 

So, if you have a business model where, you know, the only way you make money is interchange on the cards, guess what, you have to participate in the corporate card wars and play that game. We want to focus on the software primarily, not that we don’t like the money that comes from financial services, but we are a lot more focused on being a software first workflow-driven company and that’s what we are going to do.

Peter: Okay. Well, we’ll have to leave it there. Thejo, it’s really great to talk to you today, fascinating story and as you say, it’s a massive problem that really needs to be addressed. Good luck with all of your future endeavors there.

Thejo: Peter, thank you and thank you for having me on the show.

Peter: Okay, see you.

You know, as I said, the expense management space is really hot right now and, you know, I think part of the reason which we didn’t actually talk about here, but I was thinking about as I was reflecting on the conversation, is these are very sticky businesses. I mean, once you’ve got into a company like Airbase where you’re managing basically all of the non-payroll expenses of your business, it’s going to be a lot of pain to change to a new system so I can see how…..we didn’t talk about churn, but I imagine it’s very low and that’s kind of why I think they’re attracting a lot of this interest. 

I’ll link to the TechCrunch article on the show notes that talked about that last funding round, it was really quite staggering to me, it was ten days from initial conversation to the term sheet. So, I know, we live in a COVID world where everything’s done on Zoom, but even that, that’s extremely fast and it just points to I think not just the management of the business that Thejo has created, but also how the space itself, the expense management space is something that investors want to be part of.

Anyway on that note, I will sign off. I very much appreciate your listening and I’ll catch you next time. Bye.

Before we go, I want to tell you about a brand new event from LendIt Fintech. Fintech Nexus, the Dealmaker Summit, will be the first major in-person fintech event of the past 18 months, a hand-curated audience of venture capitalists, bankers, fintechs and debt investors will be meeting face-to-face at an event 100% focused on doing deals. It will be happening in Miami on September 1st and 2nd. You can apply to join and find out more at lendit.com.[/expand]

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  • Peter Renton

    Peter Renton is the chairman and co-founder of Fintech Nexus, the world’s largest digital media company focused on fintech. Peter has been writing about fintech since 2010 and he is the author and creator of the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the first and longest-running fintech interview series.