Expensya raises a $20M series B to take it to the next level!
Expensya announces the closing of a $20M series B led by MAIF Avenir and Silicon Badia. This is a major milestone with important implications that will serve as a foundation for an emerging local entrepreneurship ecosystem.
Today is an opportunity to share some thoughts on that and part of the journey that we’ve experienced while supporting Karim Jouini on different strategic fronts as an Endeavor Entrepreneur, since 2018.
A major scale-up in fintech that has the ambition to be the expense management European leader in the next 3 years.
With more than 5000 clients and users in 100 countries, Expensya has built a very solid base to reach the European leading position in expense management. Expensya’s highly interconnected platform, its efficient sales machine, and the quality of its team are now on track to leverage this financing round to replicate its success and reach this next ambitious objective.
During a challenging 2020, Expensya demonstrated its agility despite a growing size. As travel for business plummeted in 2020, they accelerated their development toward a bigger market growing their scope to business spend and also developing their own payment solutions.
One of the key enablers for this is Karim and the team being very customer-centric, never missing an opportunity to explore what Expensya can bring better than their competitors and switch to sales mode in any setting, including in a mentoring session!
Expensya is Establishing a new entrepreneurial culture starting with its employees.
Karim is a leader with the ability to surround himself with great talent, starting with his co-founder and CTO Jihed Othemani or CRO Marc Clatot. Expensya now has 140 employees, for the most part, based in Tunis, 13 nationalities, and is planning to hire 100 more people in the next 3 years. Karim is an entrepreneur who tirelessly pushes himself and his team to the maximum of their capabilities and also genuinely cares about them. We’ve also seen him in constant learning and agility mode, including as part of the Endeavor Advisory boards. The culture that is being built in Expensya is one of the assets that will certainly multiply beyond the company and hopefully spread as widely as possible.
This round is also the opportunity for local talent to familiarize and embrace stock options as a real avenue to generate wealth as most employees will be able to convert their options now and in the coming months based on this valuation. This will also drive more talent to work with startups and attract them locally. Many local angel investors will also be able to generate money and reinvest in other startups.
A role model, mentor, and investor in the future generation of entrepreneurs
In over 3 years of supporting Karim in scaling his business, we’ve seen the unique ingredients of someone who will definitely impact the local and regional ecosystem in the coming years. Aside from being a very open and direct communicator, he is always ready to provide guidance to other startup founders who can learn from his experience, and he takes this role very seriously! He also never misses an opportunity to challenge the status quo and pinpoint areas where local authorities need to move faster and create a more entrepreneurial-friendly environment.
We can expect to see Karim playing a growing role, including with Endeavor, as a mentor, investor and contributing to shape the local entrepreneurial scene to move it to the next level!
Congratulations to all the Expensya team for this great achievement!