AppZen plans product expansion
AppZen plans product expansion
TIM LEEMASTER
Anant Kale, co-founder and CEO AppZen
AppZen, the San Jose, California-based business services firm using computer vision and natural language processing, plans to move into revenue and billing, according to CEO Anant Kale.
The company originally focused on employee expenses and then last year expanded its offering into contracts.
“We’re working on building out other use cases,” Kale says. “We’ve built a platform so it already has the understanding.”
The company currently has 270 staff in its California headquarters, Arizona and India. About half are focused on research and development and engineering and the other half are focused on sales and marketing.
It plans to bring in more staff to accommodate a projected build out to 2,000 clients but keep the same 50-50 split between skills.
Kale didn’t say over what time period the expansion was projected to run. The company currently has 1,700 clients and has seen revenue double year on year.
Kale co-founded the company in 2012 with former Accenture executive Kunal Verma. Kale had worked at the Japanese electronics firm Fujitsu in the US.
AppZen raised USD 50m in a Series C funding led by Coatue Management in October and USD 35m the year before that in a Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Kale said the company has yet to touch the latest set of funds it raised and has no specific plans to raise more at this point.
“We don’t need money,” Kale says.
The company, with either unstructured or structured data, can begin working on the first day they start with a client, according to Kale.
(Read our previous coverage of the troubles companies can have with data here.)
AppZen can plug into existing employee platforms, such as Concur. The company initially struggled to convince executives of the potential savings on expense processing but adopted a strategy of comparing the same data sets at a company with one done by a human and another done by AI.
“There’s always skepticism out there on is it going to work when you’re disrupting age old-processes,” Kale says.
Customers include NVIDIA, Airbus, Hitachi and Amazon.