Our Investment in AppZen

Transforming the enterprise through AI and delivering an experience that is “freakin’ awesome”

By alex bard

Thanks to advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) we’re at an inflection point in the evolution of enterprise software. Early applications of AI in the enterprise are starting to deliver on the promise of helping companies automate, analyze and act on insights to improve their business. One area particularly ripe for disruption is in back office business operations, a function that still relies heavily on expensive and inefficient manual business processes.

Two veteran technologists, Anant Kale and Kunal Verma saw this as an opportunity and co-founded a company called AppZen to modernize the back office combining their expertise in enterprise software and AI. Since launching AppZen some of the biggest enterprises in the world including Amazon, Comcast, Hitachi and Intuit have become customers.

AppZen’s product audits and ensures compliance for expense reports using Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing machine learning algorithms. The way expense audits work today is still pretty archaic and relies in large part on manual labor. Roughly 19% of all expenses are fraudulent either intentionally or unintentionally which increases costs and compliance risk to the company. And meanwhile the experience for both employees who are submitting expenses and managers who have to approve them is a frustrating one.

AppZen works by automatically reading and understanding expense reports, receipts and travel documents. The software cross-checks these with thousands of data sources in real-time to determine the accuracy of every expense. This lets companies detect compliance problems in real-time which protects them from fines and worse. Employees get reimbursed faster and it’s easier for managers to approve expense reports.

AppZen has earned an incredible level of customer loyalty and momentum for a company at still a relatively early stage. It’s not every day a customer calls an enterprise software solution “freakin’ awesome”. But that is exactly how one T+E expense manager described AppZen to me when I was learning more about the product. Then again AppZen is not the type of company that you get to see every day as an investor.

The team, vision and incredible customer momentum are why I am so excited to announce that Redpoint has led the Series A investment to fuel the growth of AppZen. As part of the investment I will be joining the board. You can read thoughts from Anant on AppZen’s own blog here.