Compress your employees’ expenses with the Pleo hive-mind card.

Being in charge carries a lot of responsibility, especially in the financial sector of a company. Financial directors and assistants know how challenging it is to manage all the employees’ expenses. It’s not something any authoritative figure could restrict as the hired hand must purchase things they need to do their job.

Tracking employees’ receipts is a thing of the past - no more collecting receipts, scanning, and inputting them into the financial company’s system - the Pleo card can do all of that for you.

Pleo is a hive-mind card that tracks purchases on behalf of users and uploads them on an app that stores all financial spending directly into the company’s system.

Jeppe Rindom and Niccolo Perra are the co-founders of the Pleo card system that saved a lot of people some headaches. Stick around to unveil the story of two young men who decided to put financial chaos into order.

The People Behind Pleo

Now 43-year old, Danish-born, Jeppe Rindom started dabbing into the financial waters at an early age when he wanted to help his father with his work. His dad, an accountant, kept his customers’ receipts in a shoebox. Jeppe was matching the receipts with bank statements to help his father out, thus getting the feel of his future. Eventually, Jeppe would try to figure out where the missing receipts went by talking to the business owners.

Jeppe grew up getting a taste of finance here and there and eventually enrolled at the Copenhagen Business School, earning himself a Master of Science degree in Finance and Accounting in 2004.

The idea behind Pleo was triggered while Jeppe was working at Tradeshift as a Chief Finance Officer. The countless expense reports and receipts drove him crazy, which made him come up with a solution to all that chaos. Jeppe pitched the idea of Pleo while it was still a draft to his colleague, Niccolo Perra.

Niccolo, a tech buff, met Jeppe while both of them worked at Tradeshift. Being of similar spirits, Jeppe and Niccolo started sharing ideas and tips and tricks for the fintech business. Other than the 3 languages he speaks - English, German, and Italian, Nicollo is also fluent in the tech language, which is why Jeppe came to him to share the idea for Pleo.

Niccolo quickly jumped on board, since he strongly believed that a single e-card could redefine the obscure ways of financial bookkeeping.

Drafting Out the Changes

The core business play of Pleo is that it is a company card for small and mid-sized businesses. This innovation takes care of companies’ expense reports, capturing receipts, categorizing all of them, and passing them out to the firm’s account systems.

What’s unique about the Pleo card is that it is the first company card to come with artificial assistance. The manufacturer built the software around the card that has the potential of dealing with all things, excluding an assistant, like capturing receipts from reports or pockets after a purchase. The Pleo card will aid CFOs in categorizing the receipts with project numbers or categorization.

Managing and categorizing is done on behalf of the Pleo card, and then the card can pass all that information onto the central account system. All of this allows for much easier financial management that saves a lot of time, concentration, and money. In fact, according to company clients' experience and further calculation of the data, Pleo can save up to 138 working hours every year.

We're looking at a revolutionary breakthrough for financial management since the room for mistakes is brought down to zero, thanks to Pleo's many options, including employee spending cards, invoice payments, out-of-pocket expenses, accounting integrations, Pleo Fetch, and Pleo Pocket.

The user’s concerns are only to use the card, and the software will take care of the rest.

Fortifying the Finances

As a breakthrough in financial management, the project around the Pleo card has raised a total mind-boggling sum of $428,8M in the course of 7 rounds.

Although it was launched in 2015, this startup got the first €500K a year later, on May 26, 2016, from Founders and Speedinvest. The startup studio known as Founders made yet another investment of $3M on Sep 15, 2016. Other investors like Creandum funded the Jeppe and Niccolo's project with $3.3M in 2017, while Kinnevik AB invested a not-so-shabby sum of $16M in 2018. Also, a whopping sum of $56M was invested by Stripes, in 2019.

The two of the most prominent investors in Pleo are Bain Capital Ventures and Thrive Capital, which invested $150M on Jul 6, 2021. The leader, however, is Coatue who supported the project with a staggering sum of $200M on Dec 9, 2021.

Thanks to the funding, Pleo was granted the opportunity to take on the role of a leader in the industry of financial services in the world. Every other investment gave Pleo another prospect to add a better and improved feature while implementing the latest cutting-edge technology.

Careful! Bumpy Road Ahead!

One of the most significant dilemmas for Jeppe Rindom when launching this project was how to get Pleo to be fully regulated, thus supported in Europe. Fortunately, Jeppe quickly came up with a solution to this potentially deal-breaking problem.

Jeppe started working with IDT (International Discount Telecommunications) since he perceived this move to bring Pleo the option to avoid the need for regulation, due to becoming automated; thanks to the IDT support, the Pleo card curbed the bumps on the road to success. What’s even more, IDT gave Jeppe excellent references that made it possible for the card to function correctly across Europe.

The final idealization for Pleo was to target businesses with up to 100 employees, i.e., aiming to reel in businesses that have distributed purchasing power. Such companies would include businesses with staff that really need to buy things to be efficient. It primarily implies to firms whose employees are on the go, like salespeople, or maybe working individuals who need to make a purchase so to achieve a total capacity work-wise, thanks to the supplies that have been acquired.

To make sure the bumps on the road to success would be overcome, Niccolo and Jeppe had to make sure the right team is right there beside them.

Jeppe Rindom, the co-founder and CEO, and Niccolo Perra, the other co-founder, are the company’s prominent faces. However, the success of Pleo wouldn't be possible if Thorbjørn Fink, the COO, Olov Eriksson, the Vice President, and Sara Brooks, who holds the position of Vice President of Sales, weren’t in the picture. Plus, strengthened by the business aptitude of Haresh Bajaj, who is the Vice President of Product Growth, Arun Mani, the Chief Revenue Officer, and Sebastian Bjørnsen, the Performance Marketing Specialist, Pleo was on its way to lessening the financial burden of its customers.

Even though Jeppe and Niccolo thought most of the prep work was done, another bump made itself visible. The creators of the Pleo card needed to be able to track all expenses on behalf of the employees otherwise the idea behind the card would not be complete. The first time Pleo has launched, it flopped, due to not being able to fulfil requirements like tracking all the expenses.

Luckily, management stepped up and used the latest technology to upgrade the software, which proved to be the right thing, as the problem was immediately solved for good.

A Bright Future for Pleo - Yes or Yes?

The future of this company looks impressive, considering several hundred companies are waiting for the implementation of the Pleo cards, which shines a light on many prospects for Pleo. Being able to implement additional courses of action is another potential field for Pleo to grow. We can only imagine what will the financial future of the world be like once the Pleo cards are an integral part of the fintech sphere.

Headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, Pleo employs 515 people across 5 locations, and all of them come from 40 different nationalities, which makes Pleo quite a diversity-respectful company. Plus, having successfully fended off the competition coming from companies like Expensify, Brex, and Spendesk, among a few others, Pleo is definitely here to stay.

Whatever happens with Pleo, one thing is for sure - financial management will never be the same again.