Payhawk Looks to M&A After 86% Revenue Jump

Spend management platform Payhawk is reportedly going into acquisition mode.

Co-founder and CEO Hristo Borisov told CNBC in an interview published Thursday (June 6) that the company aims to acquire early-stage startups that have already raised significant funds.

He also argued his company has a better “product-market fit” than its competition, which the report notes have achieved multibillion-dollar valuations by giving free corporate cards to other startups.

Payhawk, which issues smart cards for customers’ employees to make payments and keep track of their expenses, says it saw significant growth in the first quarter of the year, with revenues up 86% and a 57% increase in customers. To build on that growth, Borisov said the company hopes to merge with or acquire other firms.

“Many businesses that got funded in the last two or three years are now in a position where they’re looking at strategic options,” Borisov said. “This is something we’re actively doing. We’re looking for companies to buy.”

“Our vision is to be able to provide a single platform that provides a homogeneous environment your corporate expense needs with a single provider,” he added. “There is going to be some market consolidation.”

These efforts come at a time when traditional expense management methods are being replaced by digital solutions that speed reimbursement times and reduce the risk of human error, as PYMNTS wrote recently.

It’s a topic that Edwin Poot and Jonathan Vaux, global chief technology officer and head of propositions and partnerships, respectively, at Thredd, discussed with PYMNTS in an interview posted in April.

As that report noted, businesses are doing things like embracing artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning algorithms, and discovering they can harness the power of data in optimizing procurement and spend management strategies.

“The largest corporations in America are using some very old, very reliable monolithic systems to manage their treasury function,” Ernest Rolfson, CEO and founder of Payments-as-a-Service solution Finexio, said in a recent interview with PYMNTS.

However, no one wants to find themselves stuck manually filing reporting and reconciliations while other businesses are handled with just one click because all their payment data and input is captured automatically, with no need for human input.

Meanwhile. Research by PYMNTS Intelligence has shown that virtual cards and digital spend management solutions can help finance departments close the books faster while guarding against fraud at the same time.