Airbase 2023: Year in review.

Happy New Year! As we enter 2024, we want to take a moment to share with our customers and the larger community the progress that Airbase made in 2023. It was an incredible year of innovation, adoption, and recognition for us.

Here are the highlights.

Launch of Guided Procurement.

We started 2023 with a bang with the launch of our purchasing intake product called Guided Procurement. This offering tames the chaos that stems from convoluted approval processes and out-of-compliance spend, and directs employees to efficient, compliant, fully documented, and approved spending.

When a product fills a white space, it’s met with rapid and widespread adoption, and we were very happy to see this occur with Guided Procurement. It has seen rapid and enthusiastic adoption by many businesses, including Doximity, GoFundMe, Fandom, dbt Labs, Retool, and many more, who immediately saw the power of linking intake to the #1 rated AP Automation solution.

We were also thrilled to see recognition for Guided Procurement so early in its evolution from procurement technology experts like Dr. Elouise Epstein, and leading analysts like IDC.

The launch of the Guided Procurement product to manage intake workflows is an important piece of the puzzle in our mission to create the best procure-to-pay solution for mid-market and early-enterprise businesses.

Airbase is the only platform I’m aware of that can actually deliver on the promise of bringing all non-payroll spend management across Procurement, AP Automation, Expense Management, and Virtual/Corporate Cards into one platform, and do it at a level of depth and maturity that meets the needs of a public company like Doximity.

— Alex Schlick, Senior Director of Accounting at Doximity.

Continued product innovation.

A hallmark of Airbase has long been its rapid pace of innovation which outstrips all others in the procure-to-pay and larger spend management space. We continued that trend in 2023 and shipped hundreds of updates throughout the year, focused on solving real problems for CFOs, controllers, procurement professionals, and corporate accountants. We know how important it is (as they say) to bring receipts, which is why we publicly share our monthly updates directly with our customers and on our website, but here are some noteworthy improvements:

• A first-of-its-kind assisted reconciliation experience that generates a real-time reconciliation report between Airbase and the ERP system — cutting down reconciliation effort from hours to minutes.
• Touchless Expense Reports for a faster and better reimbursement request and approval experience using generative AI.
• Support for multiple bank accounts (funding sources) per subsidiary, both within the U.S. and for international subsidiaries, to help our customers avoid dreaded manual inter-company journal entries and costly currency conversion fees.
• Expansion of the number of countries and currencies for bill and reimbursement payments (now at 200 countries and 145 currencies).
• Merchant category restrictions for physical and virtual cards.
• Bulk virtual card management for employee benefits and other customized use cases.
• …. and many, many more.

The pace of innovation from Airbase is incredible. They are hungry for feedback and actually listen and constantly deliver improvements.

— Amer Ali, VP Finance at Netlify

2023 was also the year we took advantage of rapidly advancing AI capabilities and furthered our investment in automation across the platform.

AI in Airbase: Delivering real value.

Airbase has always used AI across our platform, but the advancing capabilities of generative AI and large language models (LLMs) have allowed us to double down on AI in 2023. As always, we’ve focused less on hype and more on solving real problems for our customers. Here are some highlights of the improvements that we’ve delivered in 2023:

• 5X improvement in auto-matching of POs to invoices.
• 81% of card transactions are now auto-categorized and synced to the ERP system without manual intervention.
• Launch of touchless Expense Reports that can take a receipt and automatically fill out required fields like merchant, amount, GL category, and generate a purpose/description.

We’re excited to continue investing in AI-enabled improvements in 2024 to deliver more automation to save time, better control to drive compliance, and more insights to drive savings.

Airbase on the road!

Our team had the opportunity to participate and present at many industry and community events in 2023, like SuiteWorld in Las Vegas, Dreamforce 2023, CFO Leadership Conferences in Phoenix and Boston, IMA Conference in Minneapolis, The World Finance Forum in Fort Lauderdale, Procurement Foundry’s Forge Engage event in Atlanta, The U.S. FinTech Awards in New York, and APP2P in Lake Buena Vista. We’re looking forward to seeing many of you in person in 2024!

Recognition and honors.

Airbase was fortunate to be recognized throughout 2023 for the work we’ve been doing. Here are a few honors we’re especially proud of.

• Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list Airbase as the 45th fastest-growing business in North America and 7th in the San Francisco Bay Area.
• G2 end-of-year reports ranked Airbase #1 in Mid-Market AP Automation for the 6th consecutive quarter, plus a rare and distinguished perfect score of 100/100 for Customer Satisfaction in Mid-Market Spend Management.
• Spotlight in the IDC Innovators: Procurement Applications, 2023 report.
• Spend Matters “50 Providers to Watch”: Recognized for pushing procurement forward.
• CB Insights Fintech 250: The Fintech 250 is CB Insights’ annual list of the 250 most promising private fintech companies in the world.
• The Stevie® Awards: Recognized as one of the Most Innovative Tech Companies of the Year — Up to 2,500 Employees for the third year in a row.
• Forbes’ Top Startup Employers: Debuted on the list, ranking startups by employee satisfaction, reputation, and growth.
• Forrester’s “Accounts Payable Invoice Automation Landscape, Q4 2023”: Highlighted for excellence in streamlining accounts payable.

Looking forward to a great 2024.

Airbase exists to make the experience of procurement, payments, and the monthly close delightful for every stakeholder in a business. That’s a complex problem. We went broader and deeper toward delivering on that vision in 2023, and have lots of exciting updates planned for 2024. We’re grateful to our 600+ customers and the larger finance, accounting, and procurement community for their collaboration and support. The entire Airbase team is looking forward to another exciting year of learning and innovation.

In the meantime, I’d like to invite you to join our community of accounting and finance professionals. And, if you’d like to learn more about the rapidly evolving procurement sector, Airbase is sponsoring SIG’s upcoming event Navigating the Future of Procure-to-Pay, with IDC analyst and procurement expert Patrick Reymann, who will offer his unique perspective.

If you’re not yet an Airbase customer and want to learn more, we’re looking forward to hearing from you.