Intelligent Accounts Payable Platform Glean AI Announces $10.8 Million of Funding

Glean AI, the intelligent accounts payable company, announced that it has raised $10.8 million in seed financing from Contour Venture Partners (lead investor), Amex Ventures, Infinity Ventures, B Capital Group, Portage Ventures, Parameter Ventures, and several other prominent venture funds and angel investors. The funding will enable Glean AI to accelerate its growth and industry-leading spend intelligence technology.

“Today we’re excited to share details on Glean AI, the first truly strategic accounts payable (AP) platform that helps companies save money through deep insights and automation,” said Howard Katzenberg, Founder and CEO of Glean AI. “Since adding our first customer in June 2021, we’ve helped businesses understand, optimize, and uncover savings insights on over $500 million in vendor spend by using machine learning that analyzes deal terms, line-item purchases, redundant offerings, and negotiation opportunities. We’re just getting started and excited to partner with our amazing set of investors to accelerate our mission of powering Finance teams to spend intelligently.”

Prior to Glean AI, Katzenberg served as the CFO at both Better.com and OnDeck.

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Companies lack visibility into their vendor spend

Recent research suggests that 82% of small business failures are due to poor cash-flow mismanagement. Contributing to this is the fact that traditional accounts payable solutions do not provide critical information that can help Finance teams monitor and optimize their companies’ spend and better manage cash flow.

According to Glean AI, an estimated 14% of invoices contain b****** errors, and 11% of vendor spend could be reduced with greater scrutiny of invoices and b****** relationships. This translates into $130B wasted annually, just for small and medium sized businesses.

“Accounts payable is a $40 billion market opportunity, yet current leading solutions have not evolved beyond mostly just processing payments. Glean AI is positioned to disrupt this important area by building in the intelligence that saves customers significant time and money while also helping Finance teams to make more strategic and informed decisions. Howard has seen this hole in the market first hand as CFO of multiple companies. As a result, the Glean AI team is building precisely what Finance teams need, which has driven early success and adoption,” added Matt Gorin, Managing Partner and Co-Founder, Contour Venture Partners.

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Announcing Glean AI: pioneering Intelligent AP

Glean AI is the 1st Intelligent AP solution, combining smart automation with spend intelligence. Glean AI is the only platform that analyzes line-item data and uses powerful algorithms to understand cost, value, purchasing trends, and opportunities for savings, all while helping companies pay invoices faster and cut out significant manual work. As a result, Glean AI’s customers estimate they can save over 10% on their annual vendor spend and automate the equivalent of ½ a full-time employee’s time on a monthly basis.

“One of the largest pain points for the businesses we work with is that there hasn’t been a way to understand and control spending that happens outside of expense cards. We invested in Glean AI because they make it easy for businesses to dig into their invoiced spend and uncover potentially wasteful spend in a way that has not been possible before,” said Margaret Lim, Managing Director, Amex Ventures.

With Glean AI, customers not only get unmatched accounts payable automation functionality, but also timely spend insights (called ‘gleans’) that uncover where they may be overspending, analysis that is extremely unique in scope as well as powerful.

“Adopting Glean AI was a game changer for us,” said Elisa Rodriguez, Sr. Manager of FP&A for Orum, a current Glean AI customer. “Right off the bat, we were able to identify opportunities for savings without spending hours in spreadsheets crunching numbers. Our entire leadership team was blown away by the impact. We estimate saving 50% an FTE in monthly time savings already and have caught several b****** issues that would not have been uncovered but for Glean AI.”

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