LEHI — Still a few months shy of its year-and-a-half anniversary, expense management innovator Divvy has been on a scorched-earth rampage, building its client list from zero to 3,000 in that time and on Tuesday, announcing a whopping $200 million funding round.
The new capital infusion is led by bi-coastal venture giant New Enterprise Associates with participation by existing investors Insight Venture Partners and Cottonwood Heights-based Pelion Venture Partners, and it's one of the biggest single-round raises ever for a Utah company.
The Series C funding brings Divvy's total financing to date to nearly $250 million.
Divvy co-founder and CEO Blake Murray told the Deseret News that in spite of the company's breathtaking growth rate, the new funding will accelerate ongoing product development with the goal of making Divvy an indispensable tool for expense finance professionals.
"We're going to remain heavily indexed on product and engineering," Murray said. "And continue to have a maniacal focus on who our buyer is, the CFO, the vp of finance, the comptroller … and responding to what they need in their day-to-day job.
"We want it all to roll through Divvy."
The company has built a novel software platform to manage the full breadth of expense management that also enables users to create unique identifiers for every vendor and discrete credit card numbers for each employee that needs one. Purchase limits and restrictions can be pre-set and dynamically altered when necessary. Also, the product is free. Divvy earns its money on the banking side of its transactional system.
In a Medium post earlier this month, Tyler Hogge, Divvy's new vice president of strategy, shared a vision for how the company's platform will fit into the future of business expense management.
"What Salesforce was to revenue, account management, and the VP of Sales, Divvy will be to spend, expenses, and the VP of Finance." Hogge wrote. "Imagine one platform that can manage all cash flow a finance leader has to manage, both cash in and cash out.
"It would need to cover employee expenses, bill pay for vendors, short-term cash flow needs to grow the business, and more. All wrapped in beautiful, delightful software."
Along with the mammoth new capital, Divvy also gets access to the deep institutional knowledge that New Enterprise Associates brings to the table, with over four decades of investment experience. New Enterprise Associates managing general partner Scott Sandell will join Divvy's board, and is one of only four investors who have been named to the Forbes Midas List of the top tech venture capital dealmakers every year since 2007. Sandell has been involved in investments with numerous marquee operations including Uber, Houzz and Workday and his online profile notes 24 of his portfolio companies have completed IPOs or mergers.
Last summer, Anthony Bott, Jane.com's director of finance, told the Deseret News his company, a Lehi-based online retailer of clothing for women and children as well as accessories and home decor, switched to Divvy expense management. The change, Bott said, has led to both time savings and more thorough accountability.
"It was simple to set up and I can log in to the (Divvy) interface at any time to review all pending and completed transactions," Bott said. "If anybody is having any issues, I can see it and resolve them easily."
Bott noted the software allows Jane's department managers to oversee and track expenses their staff is accruing, monitor budgets and, if necessary, approve expenditures and adjust permissions for individual employees.
In addition to attracting a quarter billion dollars in investment, Divvy has built its employee roles from 30 to 200 and, according to the company, was the conduit for over 1.5 million transactions in 2018 along the way while helping finance pros create some 20,000 budgets and issue 200,000 virtual credit cards.
Pelion Venture principal and investment veteran Ben Lambert said Divvy's growth and early success, even in the fast-moving realm of tech innovators, has been impressive.
“We have never seen product market fit like this before," Lambert said. "Divvy is creating a category that businesses of all sizes and industries are adopting rapidly.
"I’ve never been part of a company that has scaled as fast as Divvy from a customer perspective. The potential is hard to explain, with Divvy every single company can have the tools they need to manage their finances for free. Divvy is as much of a no-brainer for an investor as it is for potential clients.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified Anthony Bott, the finance director of Jane.com, as Anthony Fox.