This post is, unfortunately, going to come across as snarky. That isn’t the intention, I’ve got nothing against Tipalti and it’s a solid solution that does what it says. So any snark isn’t directed at Tipalti, but rather at enterprise software in general.

That said, here’s a quick intro to what Tipalti does. The company offers a platform that helps large enterprise automate their accounts payable function. That may sound monumentally boring and of little importance, but transport yourself for a minute to the hell that is enterprise payments departments. Think of those poor, harrowed workers toiling away in something reminiscent of Dante’s Inferno. They move pieces of paper from left to right and ensure that the thousands of steps in their internal AP processes happen like magic.

For anyone used to the world of small business, the idea that a business would employ hundreds of people just to shuffle paper invoices might come as something of a shock. The unfortunate truth, however, is that enterprise is so incredible process-bound, that this is the norm. There’s a reason, after all, that Tipalti’s key reference customers are all modern technology companies and therefore focused on agility – no huge AP departments for the likes of Amazon, Roku, GoPro, twitter or GoDaddy.

Anyway, Tipalti’s solution covers off the lifecycle of accounts payable functions – supplier onboarding and vetting, tax, and regulatory compliance, touchless invoice management, cross-border payments, early payments, fraud detection, supplier payment status communications, payment reconciliation, and AP reporting.

Despite it not making sense that enterprises would still be so stuck in the dark ages, they are, and the opportunity that Tipalti aims to fill is a big one, as evidenced today by the announcement that the company has picked up a further $30 million investment from Zeev Ventures – its third major round of funding. Total funding to date is over $50 million.

Tipalti has scaled well to date, while they are somewhat vanity metrics, it is informative to see that Tipalti already processes over $4 billion in transactions annually across almost 2 million global suppliers – it seems lots of people want to move away from the frozen world of manual processes and labor intensive systems. The market, as estimated by Tipalti is around $90 billion – that’s a huge number of invoices to automate.

Chen Amit, CEO and Co-founder of Tipalti clearly states why he believes he’s on the right end of a growing trend saying that:

As organizations mature, accelerate growth, and go global, manual payments and accounts payables processes no longer scale. There is simply no way that the CFO of the future will continue spending a huge proportion of their team’s time and resources manually managing B2B payment operations, introducing risk into their organization at every step along the way. This is the problem that Tipalti uniquely solves, and our dedication to transforming AP is what will fuel our ongoing success.

There are 230 or so large enterprise customers of Tipalti’s who concur with that view. Not to mention a newly optimistic investor.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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