Rodolphe Ardant is a Paris, France-based entrepreneur who is out to solve the challenge of integrating the multitude of spend management software tools into one, all-in-one spend management platform for finance teams through the launch of Spendesk in 2016.
The idea for Spendesk began to peculate after his first start-up, an advertising automation solution called Wozaik, was acquired by a much larger organisation, the Solocal Group in 2013. “I experienced the shock of the bureaucracy of larger organisations for the first time and a lot of it was about financial processes and how finance could control the company money,” says Ardant. This founder’s journey is based on my interview with Spendesk co-founder and CEO Rodolphe Ardant.
He left Solocal Group a year later to become COO of Drivy, a startup (now part of Getaround) in the shared driving category. As the company grew fast, he found himself in a position of starting to lose control of the processes he had put in place to control company spending. Now he was experiencing the same challenge of the large company bureaucracy he so disliked.
“I started to think about this business opportunity and how we could create a tool that would support the modern finance organisation that embraces modern ways of working on how they could control spending, while liberating employees when they need to access the company money, and that was the beginning of Spendesk,” says Ardant, who would leave Drivy within the year to begin working on his integrated spend management software idea.
The Paris-based Spendesk came upon the market as the demand for such platforms was growing. The global spend management platform market stood at $15.9 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow more than 10% per year through the next decade, according to Grand View Research.
Ardant understood from experience the dilemma fast-growth companies face when trying to maintain the culture of a startup while implementing spend controls. “When you start maturing your business processes, you often start killing your organisational agility. And that’s one of the purposes of Spendesk, to provide a consumer-like experience to people when they need to spend the company money while ensuring that it’s done within the framework of finance controls,” says Ardant.
While it took three years to bring the platform to market, the now 600 person-company has scaled quickly, servicing over 4,000 companies and growing 4X year-over-year over the past few years by focusing on the needs of small to medium sized businesses. “We are solving a real problem in the market. The payment process is really at the center of every business exchange and the centerpiece of the business operating system. And traditionally, this has been starved for solutions, in particular in the SMB mid market,” says Ardant. According to Ardant, most SMBs struggle with spend management and rely on several single point solutions. “There was a gap in the market and nobody was satisfied with their payment experience at work. And we came along with a new solution to solve that,” adds Ardant.
As a France-based company, Spendesk was designed with multiple markets in mind, having the ambition to become the new standard of payment at work and becoming an international business. The company’s growth to date and large addressable market has allowed it to attract $311.8 million in funding over 6 rounds. Their latest funding was raised in January 2022 with a $100 million Series C round led by Tiger Global. Additional investors include General Atlantic, Eight Roads Ventures, Index Ventures, eFounders and others. The investment valued the company at more than $1 billion.
Despite its early claim on the expense management solution market, Spendesk is not without competition such as SAP Concur, Zoho, Brex, Expensify and a host of others. However, Ardant sees the large market need as a rising tide that raises all boats. “I think we’ve got a very differentiating highlight on the market. But it’s still very early for everyone in this market. The market is very new. The way companies manage is changing, transitioning to the consumerization of ways of working. We’re well on this macro trend. So basically, the pie is increasing,” says Ardant.
Ardant was born in France, but his father’s work took the family to live in several foreign countries like Italy, Greece and Tunisia. He returned to Paris to attend and graduate from France’s preeminent science and technology institution, École Polytechnique, with a degree in physics, followed by earning his MS in electrical engineering at Columbia Engineering in New York. Neither institution nor the Paris business scene, for that matter, were known for having a strong startup culture at the time. Yet, after completing his studies, he co-founded his first company Woizaik. He attributes his entrepreneurial focus to his love of seeing the impact of his work and solving problems after working on side business projects during his time at university.
Given Spendesk’s significant financing, might an IPO be imminent? “No, that’s clearly not the immediate priority. And that’s not the priority for our investors. We’ve got long term investors who have raised a significant amount of capital with us because they believe we have the opportunity to create a generational company,” concludes Ardant.
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