Spend controlling and management software is eyeing unprecedented opportunities in China, with prevailing electronic invoices and raising needs of enterprises.
Person holding 100 U.S. dollar bill. Image Credit: Artem Beliaikin/Unsplash
A Chinese corporate cost management Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company eKuaibao announced it has raised USD 50 million in Series C round and an extended Series C round today, led by Tiger Global Management and Sequoia China, separately. The deal brought the total funding amount to a record-setting level of USD 65 million this year in the sector in China, with USD 15 million in Series B round Jan.
“eKuaibao is a representative that provides highly-standardized products with good user experience (UX) in the spend management market,” Sequoia China’s partner Zheng Qingsheng claimed.
The leading investment firm has been betting on China’s SaaS (read more about it in the latest EqualOcean report -- download) for a long time: GeeTest (online identity verification), GuanData (business intelligence), Beisen (HR), etc. Tiger Global rides on the wave of enterprise tech era as well and its portfolio includes BestSign and Fadada (online contracts), Udesk (customer service), Taimei Technology (Pharma OCR SaaS).
The two leading investors observed a large total addressable market (TAM) as the electronic invoice prevailed since 2015. With the government’s support and enterprises’ needs for transparent and efficient spend management, around 40 SaaS vendors were born in China at that time and tried to seize the opportunity.
Founded in 2014, eKuaibao provides solutions for enterprises to manage their procurement costs and approve employees’ reimbursement requests via an online. Eyeing in developing into an agile corporate accounting desk, the company touches upon issues from purchase request to general ledger. All the data in the process syncs directly to consumption websites, invoice inspection systems, bank accounts, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and customer relationship management (CRM) systems in real-time.
eKuaibao’s founder Ma Chunquan (马春荃) said the company has tripled its revenue (this year) and served an accumulated number of 175,000 clients to date. The company did not disclose any number about customer churn or retention but claimed a sound customer renewal rate.