Dive Brief:

• Stampli, a fintech that uses artificial intelligence to simplify the invoice payment process for businesses, has opened an office in Austin, Texas. The location opened the week of Aug. 14, according to an interview with Stampli CEO Eyal Feldman.
• The Mountain View, California-based company, which currently employs 250 people, plans to add 100 workers, the CEO said, expanding the headcount 40% over the next year.
• “We’re going to invest more and more in marketing and also customer success to be able to reach out to a bigger audience,” said Feldman. “That’s why we recently opened an office in Austin.”

Dive Insight:

Payments companies across the industry are mulling ways in which they can incorporate AI into their operations, from tapping it for fraud prevention to speeding up software development, among other uses.

Stampli has years of experience training its automation tools. Those years of practice have positioned the company for growth, despite job cuts across the payments industry.

“Today, we have 250 employees,” Feldman said in an interview this month. “And we’re growing that quite substantially. Next year will be about 350.”

The Austin location is the third office for the company, which also has a presence in Nashville, Tennessee, in addition to its headquarters. The Austin location currently has 15 employees, said Dave Prager, Stampli’s vice president of marketing. 

“While the (Austin) office officially opens its doors Thursday, we have had a presence in a WeWork (space) for a couple months while we built out the initial team,” said Prager said by email.

Feldman sees a lot of room for growth, based on the fact that Stampli’s use of AI allows it to scale much more quickly than its competitors. He points back to the founding of the company in 2014, a time when competitors were using manual methods for repetitive tasks like paying invoices. 

“When we started the company, the incumbents in the space had hundreds if not thousands of people that would actually manually look at customer invoices and code some information,” said Feldman. “When we started we had zero people doing that. It was all done by AI.”

The privately-held company has raised $87 million in capital to date, Prager said by email.

Nonetheless, Stampli faces plenty of competition. Automating the accounts payable and accounts receivable processes has become a hot payments play in recent years. Other fintechs targeting that fast-growing arena include Paymerang; AvidXchange; CSI Enterprises; and the Corpay unit of Atlanta-based Fleetcor Technologies. In addition, major players like Stripe, Bill and Block-owned Square are seeking to digitize that business-to-business payments traffic.

In addition to accounts payable services, including related documentation and communication, Stampli provides direct pay services, purchase order processing and employee expense management services, according to the company’s website.