Growfin’s AI-based cash pickup SaaS further expands to US and Asia

Cash management, keeping track of who should pay an invoice and whether it has been done, can make or break a business. Now a startup building SaaS software to help finance departments manage this more intelligently is announcing some funding to expand after seeing strong demand.

growth fin, a Singapore and San Francisco-based fintech startup that provides SaaS to finance departments to track and collect payments and help manage the accounts receivable process, has raised a $7.5 million Series A. The company plans to use this funding to continue to expand in the US and Asia, and redouble efforts in building more AI-based technology to expand its platform. The next step: a forecasting tool that predicts trends “based on past payment behavior and current accounts receivable data via Growfin.”

SWC Global of Singapore led the funding round with the participation of existing backers 3one4 Capital and angel investors. The startup touts the latest funding due to an 8x growth in the number of clients in the last 12 months, during which time Growfin has helped clients collect more than $1 billion in accounts receivable ( AR). Growfin has now raised $9 million in total and is not disclosing its valuation.

Growfin is taking advantage of a mature market, especially given the current economic climate and the pressures it is putting on companies of all sizes.

A recent Gartner report found that 78% of CFOs have invested in automation and cash flow visibility technology. But while they are increasingly willing to pay for tools to help them plan for the future, when it comes to checking accounts, many still rely on spreadsheets, exposing a chasm between having visibility into a company’s current financial state and knowing how that relates to what it might look like in a week, month, or year.

Growfin’s initial product was an AI-powered financial CRM, which finance, sales and customer success teams could use to connect in one place to manage customer relationships during the payment and cash collection processes, a smart bridging product that talks about how account extraction accounts receivable departments could sometimes do better if they could join forces and insights with those who manage the majority of the customer relationship prior to that point. (And indeed, a smoother experience could lead to more sales down the road.)

Rather than build an AR automation product, the company built a financial CRM that not only automates financial accounts receivable workflows, but also provides the right collaboration capabilities and real-time visibility into sales, success of the customer and the customers themselves in one place (where everyone sees the same information).

That first push toward greater financial visibility caught on. Growfin’s core users are currently scaling B2B tech companies across SaaS, adtech, logistics tech, and edtech, and now has 25 clients, including Intercom, four kites, mental tickling, LeadSquareand Quick-dry restoration, Growfin co-founder and CEO Aravind Gopalan told TechCrunch. You sell primarily to clients who are finance teams, although, as you might guess, revenue-generating teams like sales and customer success are also users of your service. The startup says it now has $400,000 in annual recurring revenue since launching 12 months ago.

Intercom uses Growfin to automate and track its collection activities, integrating with NetSuite, Zuora and Salesforce and providing real-time visibility to finance leaders, Gopalan explained. “We helped them reduce their cash collection cycle from 91 days to 59 days in a span of 5 months, improving collection efficiency by 35%,” he said.

Locus, a logistics technology startup that uses Growfin to resolve invoice disputes to collect payments faster, claims it has improved the productivity of its teams by 60% in ten months, Gopalan said.

Founded in 2021 by Gopalan and Raja Jayaram, the co-founders told TechCrunch that they met with more than 200 financial leaders around the world when the product was still in development to learn more about the issues they often face. The resounding message was that finance teams were dissatisfied with legacy spreadsheet-based systems and the costly prospect of simply hiring more people as a solution to the time-consuming workload.

“Managing accounts receivable and collecting payments is often complex and gets even more complicated as businesses grow. Despite the growth of ERPs and CRMs like Salesforce and Netsuite, I understand that 90% of finance teams still manage their AR (Accounts Receivable) processes outside of these tools, typically in internal spreadsheets or databases. Gopalan said. “This collaborative-first approach will deliver better efficiencies and greater transparency and build trusted customer-business relationships to collect B2B payments faster.”

It employs 40 people and plans to double its workforce this year in the US, where most of its clients are located, as well as in Asia.

Growfin’s competitors include HighRadius, Upflow, Tesorio, YayPay, and Gaviti. ERP service providers are an indirect rival, Gopalan said.

“Growfin’s AI-powered system is poised to disrupt the way companies collect their invoice payments by standing on top of industry-dominating ERP systems like Netsuite and Microsoft dynamics,” says Tuck Lye Koh, Partner Founder of SWC Global. “Globally, they have more than 100,000 clients, and now finance teams engaged with these systems will be able to connect Growfin to get a deeper and broader view of their financial well-being with efficiency and real-time cash flow forecasting.”