AppZen Secures $180M to Revolutionize Finance Teams with Agentic AI

With Amazon And Salesforce As Customers, Agentic AI Startup AppZen Lands $180M To 'Transform' Finance Teams

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.

AppZen raises $180M to automate enterprise finance operations - SiliconANGLE

California-based AppZen Inc., a leading agentic artificial intelligence platform for finance teams, today announced it raised $180 million in a Series D growth funding round led by Riverwood Capital to scale up the company's autonomous finance software. Founded in 2012, the company incorporates generative AI to automate manual financial processes, such as accounts payable, corporate card management and travel and expense. The underlying platform uses AI agents, powered by more than 200 specialized ZenLM finance models that act as digital workers on the behalf of employees. AppZen's flagship agentic product is the Mastermind AI Automation platform, which allows companies to describe business processes in straightforward logic. Finance experts can then turn their process knowledge into automated workflows without needing coding skills or information technology department support. The company's AI models are trained specifically for finance and semantic understanding, supporting customers across more than 40 languages and 60 countries. Enterprises can deploy the platform for multi-entity and multi-currency operations, helping them manage highly regulated and complex environments. "Riverwood's scale-up expertise and global network will help us accelerate the deployment of Mastermind AI Agents, so finance workflows can run on autopilot," said co-founder and Chief Executive Anant Kale. "With many of the world's largest companies already on AppZen, demand for autonomous finance has never been higher." According to AppZen, its Mastermind platform and other agentic tools help finance teams reduce manual review, reduce spend leakage and ensure regulatory compliance. By converting standard operating procedures into intelligent automated processes, the company says it can replace more than 50% of manual work while scaling operations without additional headcount or outsourcing. For example, enterprises can use the platform to build approval workflows for common finance scenarios where AI agents act as digital team members. These agents can analyze expense approvals, make nuanced decisions based on company policies, and either approve or reject transactions. Although autonomous, they also recognize when a situation requires human judgment and will flag it for review. Finance team feedback is used to further refine performance, with agents learning from interactions and completed tasks. Feedback from the finance team is used by the AI agents to refine and improve performance, including learning from team interactions and completed tasks. "AppZen's impact at Airbus was immediate," said Waqas Aman, head of financial systems North America at Airbus SE, the European aerospace company. "It significantly reduced the workload for our T&E analysts, allowing them to focus on more strategic activities." In August, AppZen announced a partnership with Sales Innovation, a go-to-market firm, to expand its operations in the Asia-Pacific region. Together, the companies plan to market AppZen's platform to B2B software providers across the region.