AppZen, which has built an agentic AI platform for finance teams, has raised $180 million in a Series D round, the company told Crunchbase News.
Riverwood Capital led the growth financing round and was the only participant. With the latest raise, San Jose, California-based AppZen has raised a total of $290 million over its lifetime, according to Anant Kale, the company’s CEO and co-founder. Previous backers include 500 Global, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, Bloomberg Beta and Redpoint, per Crunchbase.
AppZen declined to reveal its new valuation, saying only it was an “up round.” The company had raised $50 million in a Series C funding round at a $500 million post-money valuation in September 2019, according to Crunchbase data.
Founded in 2012 by Kale and CTO Kunal Verma, AppZen claims to have been an AI-first company since its founding, with the mission of building an AI platform specifically for back-office finance teams. It launched its first Expense Audit product in 2014.
Today, AppZen says it works with “thousands” of enterprises globally, providing enterprise-grade agentic AI for travel and expense, accounts payable and card workflows.
Kale charges that many businesses today are simply “camouflaged” as AI companies, and are completely reliant on LLMs. He claims that AppZen’s proprietary AI models, which have been developed and trained over the past 10 years, are more effective.
Specifically, the company combines LLMs with its new Mastermind AI Studio, a product offering that gives customers a way to build and deploy AI agents as digital workers without coding or IT support. That combination, AppZen says, speeds adoption.
Put simply, AppZen’s mission is to “transform” finance teams with its AI agents, Kale told Crunchbase News.
Previously, he said, the most common way for finance teams to reduce costs was by offshoring “as none of the rules and analytics-based software systems can automate human work.”
AppZen works with existing ERP systems that companies have, including software from SAP, Oracle and others, and automates the manual work with its AI agents.
‘Not just another automation tool’
It must be doing something right. AppZen said it counts more than 500 global enterprise companies as customers, including 65 of the Fortune 500. Those customers include Amazon, Salesforce 1, JP Morgan Chase, Airbus and Databricks, among others.
That customer traction is part of what drew Riverwood Capital to write a check to AppZen.
Francisco Alvarez-Demalde, co-founder and managing partner at the firm, told Crunchbase News via email that his firm became interested in backing AppZen because the startup had “already proven itself with many of the world’s largest enterprises.”
“Finance is at a turning point, moving from manual reviews and simple automation to truly autonomous operations,” he added. “AppZen is leading that shift, using AI agents to run core finance workflows in global organizations.”
Alvarez-Demalde argues that AppZen “is not just another automation tool.”
In his view, it’s becoming the “agentic AI orchestration layer for the office of the enterprise CFO, where AI agents connect and run finance processes across borders and languages.”
“That allows companies to manage growing complexity without adding headcount, while giving finance leaders the control and efficiency they need,” Alvarez-Demalde said.
AppZen says that it is “cash flow positive and growing at a healthy rate” and has more than 300 employees.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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