Alumni-founded Payhawk Raises $20 Million
Payhwak, the platform for payments and expense management co-founded by AUBG alumnus Hristo Borisov (’10), closed a $20 million financing round, 12 months after raising its seed round.
The Series A round is led by the US-based fund QED Investors, which has a strong track record of investing in 18 fintech unicorns, including Klarna and Nubank. Existing investor Earlybird Digital East, who led the $3.6 million seed round in March 2020, is also contributing fresh capital. Yusuf Ozdalga will join the Payhawk board alongside existing investors Mehmed Atici from Earlybird Digital East and Vassil Terziev (’01) from Eleven Ventures.
“We have huge ambitions for the year ahead. Over the next year, we are keen to provide great support to finance teams across 30+ countries to manage company cards, invoices and payments in a unified and efficient way,” said Borisov who is also the CEO of the company.
Payhawk acts as a one-stop-shop, combining payments, invoices and expense management, and closing the gap between banks and Enterprise Resource Planning systems. As a result, Payhawk empowers finance teams to reduce manual work, keep tight control of budgets in real-time, and fully automate spend across every payment method.
In 2020, Payhawk posted 10x growth and then doubled its revenue in the first quarter of 2021. The new fundraise will enable it to expand its product offering and triple its marketing and sales team to increase presence in key markets.
The fintech is headquartered in London, and was founded in 2018 by Borisov, Boyko Karadzhov and Konstantin Djengozov. Its customer base consists of a mix of fast-growing and mature multinational companies like LuxAir, Lotto24, Holded, Nexo, MacPaw and By Miles.
A computer science and business administration major at AUBG, Borisov began his career at alumni-founded Telerik (acquired by Progress Software in 2014) while still a student. There he helped develop some of the company’s award-winning products. He is also a founding member of the Citizens app, a crowdsourcing platform that improves drivers’ behavior on the road.
