It’s no surprise that Alaan, the Middle East’s leading spend management platform, just completed a highly successful $48 million Series A funding round. This breakthrough was one of the biggest increases of its kind ever achieved in the entire MENA region. Alaan was co-founded by Parthi Duraisamy and Karun Kurien, both ex-McKinsey consultants. Their mission is to change the way finance teams control their spend.
Peak XV Partners was the investment round leader. Each of the listed investors—founders of 885 Capital, Y Combinator, 468 Capital, and Pioneer Fund—came to the round. All eyes are on Alaan for an enormous upcoming investment, due to its remarkable financials. The company has achieved profitability on the strength of $10 million in revenue against only $5 million in expenses.
Alaan has begun to establish a prominent space for itself in the fintech industry by using artificial intelligence as a core value proposition to provide deeper insights. The platform started leveraging AI to automate basic tasks like matching receipts, reconciliation, and VAT extraction. Not long ago, OpenAI became an exciting part of Alaan’s arsenal, reinforcing Alaan’s commitment to trailblaze the finance automation space.
Despite only launching in 2022, Alaan has quickly established a reputation in the market for their innovative solutions. The platform is currently used by over 2.5 million transactions daily, enabling more than 1,500 finance teams to collaborate across large, complex regional enterprises. Flagship clients including G42, Careem, Tabby, and Lulu Group have all reported notable returns on investment from Alaan’s offerings. Combined, they’ve saved finance teams more than 1.5 million hours of tedious, manual tasks!
Duraisamy shared his experience:
“The biggest challenge we faced, both in the UAE and Saudi Arabia, was simply going live.” – Parthi Duraisamy
In so short a time, Alaan has achieved some big operational milestones. Having recently launched in Saudi Arabia earlier this year, Pie has been experiencing its transaction volumes doubling month over month for the past six months. This hyper growth is a reflection of the booming demand for smarter spend management solutions across ANZ.
Alaan’s offerings include an integration of Apple Pay into its B2B services, positioning itself as a pioneer in the region. Perch intends to use its recent funding to continue scaling its business. Overall, it will zero in on building out its sales, customer success and compliance teams while doubling down on AI-led finance automation as a whole.
Duraisamy emphasized the importance of fundamentals when discussing their growth strategy:
“When you talk to investors, what really matters for a company at our stage is the fundamentals: how capital-efficient we are, how much revenue we generate, how strong our go-to-market motion is.” – Parthi Duraisamy
The Series A funding round comes on the heels of Alaan’s $2.5 million mid-2021 seed round. Through its impressive versatility and bouncing ability in the swiftly developing fintech rope, the company has readily maintained the industry’s critical conversation.
