New Funding to Build our Automation Platform for Finance Teams

When my co-founder Eran Katoni and I launched our first product nearly three years ago, we knew that we wanted to smash the status quo in finance operations and bring automation and innovation to the back office. What we couldn’t know then was how the pandemic would change everything about how companies work, spend money, and do business.

And as companies operationalize distributed and remote workforce models, holistic and real-time visibility over company spend is reaching a tipping point. The CFO office will never go back to pre-pandemic business as usual and we’re committed to building the CFO tech stack for the new, new normal.

Today, I am excited to share an important milestone with our customers, partners, employees and the rest of the fintech community. Mesh Payments has raised $60 million in a new equity funding round, bringing our total funding to $123 million. The funding helps us accelerate our growth, and pursue our mission of helping bring automation to finance teams so they can better manage their spend, cut costs, and ensure the success of their companies.

But this milestone doesn’t come in isolation; we aren’t running our business in a vacuum. The world changed yet again. With inflationary pressure, lower access to capital, and other factors weighing on the global economic outlook, most businesses are currently strategizing ways to lower their costs and extend their run rate.

The current economic landscape reminds me in many ways of the ongoing drought impacting many countries around the globe. Rivers are hitting historic lows and that has brought with it all kinds of challenges for ships looking to navigate these waterways. The business environment is like that too.

Strong Business Fundamentals

Many startup companies across the world are facing a funding crunch. Boom times led to a raft of higher valuations and easy access to capital. That world is gone, and many startups are dealing with a hangover of overly inflated valuations.

It has always been a top priority for me as a CEO and for the rest of our senior management team to lead Mesh with a responsible hand that not only protects our investors and employees, but enables us to provide the top-tier level of service to our customers that is the core of our business.

Driven by Product Demand

In our conversations with our investors, one point that came up over and over again, is the positive feedback they were hearing from our customers about how Mesh helps them cut costs and control their spending. This, more than any other metric, is what I see as our single greatest value.

At the end of the day, whether you’re looking at fintech or any other market, a company’s success depends on the experience, value, and relationship it builds with its customers. Our funding allows us to continue our investments in customer support and customer success, along with our intense focus on innovation and user experience.

Our finance automation platform continues to evolve and that evolution is driven by the feedback and close relationship we have with our customers. Our investors understand that we are providing real value to our users that goes above and beyond surface level benefits to address critical and strategic needs for our 1000+customers.

Optimizing Every Dollar

The current economic landscape didn’t create the need for businesses to cut costs and optimize their spending – that need has always been there. The current landscape merely brought the need to cut costs into immediate and sharp relief.

For any business to thrive – not just exist or grow – but to truly thrive and set itself apart from competitors, it must optimize every dollar it spends – every resource it consumes. Our funding round is a validation of the strength of our product, the value it provides to businesses and the hardworking team at Mesh.

Announcing an important milestone like this makes me feel lucky, and I feel especially privileged to share it with so many incredible people at Mesh and with the community of CFOs and finance teams we are building products for every day.

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Oded Zehavi, CEO and co-founder, Mesh Payments

Oded Zehavi is the co-founder and CEO of finance automation platform Mesh Payments. Previously, Oded served as Payoneer’s Chief Revenue Officer, and led the launch of PayPal Middle East and Africa. He has extensive experience in leadership roles at various technology, banking, and software companies, and serves as a board member or advisor to several fintech companies.