Rho, a corporate spend and cash management startup here in NYC, took to LinkedIn on Thursday to announce it raised $75 million in fresh funding. The Series B was co-led by Dragoneer Ventures and DFJ Growth, and will be used to create “new products and features,” the company said. Rho is also hiring, with more than a dozen open tech positions available now.
In a recent blog post, Rho’s co-founder and CEO Everett Cook described the business financial space as “one of the largest vertical spaces yet to be truly transformed by innovation,” claiming that, as few as three years ago, it was “nearly impossible” to even open so much as a business bank account online.
Of course, a lot has changed in three years. And, like virtually every industry these days, banking is going through a rapid digital transformation — a digital transformation that Rho hopes to be at the forefront of with its “frictionless finance” solution. This entails bringing all aspects of banking, cards and accounts payable together in one place, where it can be automated.
This integrated approach led Rho to launch a new accounts payable product alongside a $15 million Series A in January. It then rolled out a corporate card in May in an effort to capture a chunk of the $1.4 trillion U.S. commercial card purchase volume. This move followed in the footsteps of a flurry of other fintech companies offering their own cards, including Expensify and Ramp, which hit unicorn valuation earlier this year after a $115 million raise.
Meanwhile, Rho seems to be doing well in its own right, especially considering it was founded in 2018 and only launched last year. The startup’s annualized transaction volume grew from about $2 billion in December 2020 to a cumulative volume of $3 billion between January and November of this year, as reported by TechCrunch. The company’s November transaction volume alone reportedly earned it a $6 billion annualized run rate. And Cook seems confident that the industry is moving into the “era of frictionless finance” long term.
“Rho has grown tremendously in just over three short years, and so has what we deliver to clients,” Cook said. “We believe our clients are our partners, and we only succeed when they do. We’re thankful and grateful for those that have been on this journey with us since the beginning as well as those that have just started working with Rho.”
Existing investors including M13, Inspired Capital and Torch Capital participated in this round, along with new investors like Helium-3 Ventures, Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff, Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai, and Public.com co-founders Leif Abraham and Jannick Malling.
