AI comes to expense reports • TechCrunch

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welcome to The exchange! If you received this in your inbox, thank you for signing up and your declaration of confidence. If you are reading this as a post on our site, please register here so that you can receive it directly in the future. Each week, I’ll take a look at the hottest fintech news from the previous week. This will include everything from funding rounds to trends to an analysis of a particular space to hot takes on a particular company or phenomenon. There’s a lot of fintech news out there, and it’s my job to stay on top of it—and make sense of it—so you can stay up to date. — Mary Ann

Hello and welcome back. We finally got the power back after the ice storm, and I’m feeling better after catching a cold – but since I’m still not running at full capacity, this newsletter will be shortened a bit.

Rebrands are not uncommon in the startup world, and the fintech space is no exception. They are especially more prevalent when companies pivot to adapt to external circumstances. Last week TripActions announced it was rebranding and is now called Navan.

I, for one, wasn’t surprised by the news since TripActions transitioned from being a travel expense management company to a corporate card and expense management for businesses more generally soon after the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020. In 2021, CEO and co-founder Ariel Cohen told me that revenue wasn’t just falling—it was bottoming out. . . to zero. That’s when management decided to focus their efforts on the then-new Liquid offering, which seems to have worked out quite well for the company. In October, amid continued growth, the company raised $154 million in equity capital at a $9.2 billion valuation, up from a previous valuation of $7.5 billion, as well as a $150 million structured financing deal from Coatue. Then in December it secured $400 million in credit facilities from Goldman Sachs and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB).

Its rebrand is apparently more than just a name change. The company said it has now consolidated its travel, business and spending offerings into “a single super application.” On top of that, Navan – a combination of navigate and forward (or beyond) – claims to be the first travel company to integrate OpenAI and ChatGPT APIs across its infrastructure and product set.

The company says it is currently using its generative AI technology to write, test and fix code with the aim of increasing operational efficiency and reducing overhead. So now, through Ava – Navan’s virtual assistant – travel managers can personalize recommendations and increase travel engagement, executives claim. They also say administrators can use the tool as a personal assistant to perform tasks such as performing personal data analysis, providing detailed details of carbon emissions or ordering business cards for their company. Meanwhile, travelers can do things like perform a travel search, resolve customer support issues and even recommend an Indian restaurant near their hotel in London, for example.

A company spokesperson told me via email: “Program administrators will be able to ask Ava to report across the travel and spending programs, whether it’s via text, graph, PDF, etc. We’re also using AI to do everything from eliminate expense reporting to automate specifications – and in the case of hotel folios, we retrieve them immediately from the hotel after a stay, categorize order lines, compare it to company guidelines and submit for the user, so there is no need for them [to] moving pennies around to balance out a folio – a process that is quite painful in my experience.”

Personally, we’ve been wondering at TC when generative AI would impact the fintech space, so I’m intrigued by this move on TripActions – I mean Navan’s – part.

But I should point out that Navan wasn’t the only company in the financial sector to announce that it was incorporating AI into its products.

Last week, TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez reported that Microsoft and American Express announced they were teaming up to put AI to work “to help with the frustrating and laborious task of filing and auditing business expense reports.” She wrote: “The companies agreed to expand their decade-long partnership to build solutions leveraging Microsoft Cloud and AI technologies, starting with expense report management. According to Amex, the first solution will leverage machine learning and AI to automate expense reporting and approvals .” However, Amex says the AI ​​is something it’s built in-house – it’s not leveraging Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI, but using the Microsoft Cloud.You can read more about that deal here.

Fascinating! I expect we’re only going to hear more about AI being incorporated into the world of financial services.

More layoffs

Last week, Confirm announced that they are reducing their staff by 19% and shutting down their crypto unit. It also missed analysts’ estimates of revenue and earnings. All this news led to a sharp drop in the share price. It’s further evidence of buy now pay later as a space struggles. I plan to get more into that next week, so stay tuned.

Pleasure also cut jobs — laying off 126 people last week. Last May, TechCrunch had reported that the HR technology unicorn, which was worth nearly $10 billion at the time, raised an extension of its 2021-era Series E funding round. That financing event included $175 million in seed capital, a tranche of secondary shares and a tender offer.

Ironically, explains TC’s Natasha Mascarenhas, at the end of last month Gusto’s editor-in-chief wrote about the topic of layoffs – and the bottom line facing small businesses looking to acquire talent.

“Call me cynical, but at the end of the day, a big business will always choose itself over a lot of employees. It’s just the nature of the beast. Small businesses have to use this to their advantage.”

TechCrunch reached out to Gusto for comment and was told the cuts represented roughly 5% of its workforce. A spokesperson also told me: “All staff were notified by email. Affected employees also received a text message directing them to the email.” An employee, who wished to remain anonymous, said the move came as a surprise as the company claims it is in “stable financial condition”. The same employee cited a toxic work culture, a sentiment echoed by some Blind users.

Weekly news

According to Axios: “Robin Hood announced that it plans to buy back shares of Sam Bankman-Fried’s Emergent Fidelity Technologies. The particular Robinhood share is currently in legal hell following FTX’s implosion. Robinhood’s board has approved the purchase of “most or all” of the 55 million shares Emergent Fidelity Technologies bought last year, the earnings report said on Wednesday. Emergent Fidelity Technologies was formed to buy 7.6% of Robinhood in early 2022. However, the stake is now disputed by several players.” Ouch. I’m sure Robinhood didn’t foresee this when he gave up these shares.

Pai Insurance, which offers workers compensation insurance to small businesses, announced that it has completed its transition to a “rated full-stack carrier.” Pie will begin issuing its own policies later this year following the recent acquisition of a nationally licensed insurance company (formerly American Insurance Company), now renamed Pie Insurance Company. We last covered Pie in September when it raised a $315 million Series D. Pie also expanded into commercial auto insurance as MGA for Ford Motor Credit Company through the launch of Ford Pro Insure.

From Manish Singh: “Fintech Kissht and PayU’s LazyPay is among the apps that India’s IT ministry has blocked in the ongoing attack as New Delhi moves to curb misuse of consumer data and protect the nation’s integrity.” More here.

PayPal’s the stock is up again. The company announced during its fourth-quarter earnings call that longtime CEO Dan Schulman plans to retire at the end of the year. But earnings topped analysts’ estimates. Last week we wrote about the company’s plans to lay off 2,000 employees.

In July 2022, Brazilian fintech alt.bank launched novücard, a credit card in Brazil that has a “dynamic” credit limit, with the ability to see the limit adjust up and down automatically based on usage and payment recency. A company spokesperson told me that since its launch, novücard has grown to 150,000 new customers, “making it the fastest growing credit card in Brazil.” She added: “As many as 3,000 new customers per day get a new novücard. The company expects this number to grow, primarily boosted by word of mouth – and that the number of customers will increase to 2 million by the end of 2023.” Fintech alt.bank was founded by American Brad Liebmann and has 130 employees based mainly in São Paulo and São Carlos. The company raised $5.5 million in seed funding in May 2021.

Financing and M&A

Former CTO of Gemini launches Fierce, a super app for high-yield finance

New Social Investment Platform Follow influencers to mirror their investment strategies

SUMA Wealth acquires Reel to close the US wealth gap. Christine covered last year:

Sequoia Capital Southeast Asia supports cross-border payments startup Tazapay

Investment platform Moonfare caps Series C expansion at $15 million

That’s it for this week. Thanks again for sticking with me and I hope to be back to you full speed next week. Enjoy the rest of the weekend! xoxo, Mary Ann