For companies operating around the world, hiring vendors for one-off purchases in other countries can be a complicated process, eating up time and resources.
Onboarding new vendors often requires tax forms, compliance checks and obtaining bank information. For smaller, one-off tasks — say, ordering flowers for a one-time corporate event — all that overhead can prove more trouble than it’s worth.
Enter Candex. The New York-based startup aims to help large companies pay small, one-time, or irregular vendors without the administrative headache or risk that comes with onboarding them.
Candex essentially acts as a tech-based master vendor. A large company sets Candex up in its system once and when it wants to make a purchase from a small supplier, it pays Candex, which then handles the compliance, tax and payment delivery to the actual supplier.
Today, the company shared exclusively with Crunchbase News that it has raised $40 million in a Series C extension from longtime customer London-based bank HSBC. The company says the financing brings its total funding to over $120 million since its 2011 inception.
Existing backers include Goldman Sachs Asset Management, JP Morgan, American Express Ventures and 9Yards Capital. Candex raised $33 million in the first tranche of the Series C last July, which was led by 9Yards.
The raise comes amid a wider surge in funding to fintech startups. Global funding to VC-backed financial technology startups totaled around $53 billion in 2025, per Crunchbase data. That’s a roughly 27% increase from 2024. Like Candex, many of the more heavily funded fintech startups in recent quarters focus on helping companies automate and streamline their processes, often through use of AI.
Bigger footprint
Founded by Jeremy Lappin and Shani Vaza, Candex says it surpassed $1 billion in payments in 2025. While it did not disclose hard revenue figures, the company makes money primarily through transaction fees on purchases made through its platform, similar to how a credit card interchange fee works.
It counts hundreds of Fortune 2000 companies among its customers, including HSBC, Sanofi, Diageo, Roche, Colgate-Palmolive, Danone and Dell Technologies, among others.
The company claims its biggest value proposition is that it solves tail spend (the majority of a company’s suppliers that account for a small percentage of its total spend) in a way that is “simple, compliant, and fully integrated into existing enterprise systems.”
“Candex does not ask companies to change how they buy,” said Lappin. “It works within their existing procure-to-pay process.”
The startup also says one of its biggest differentiators is that it uses automation and AI for invoice and tax verification.
It plans to use the new capital to expand globally, particularly its footprint in Asia and the Middle East, and further automate its offering. Presently, it has more than 270 employees and operates in more than 50 countries.
For its part, HSBC says its decision to invest comes after years of being a Candex customer. “We see Candex as a differentiated solution for helping large organizations improve vendor management and operational efficiency at scale,” Craig Cuffie, group chief procurement officer at HSBC, said in a press release.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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