Tradeshift, the SF-based enterprise invoicing startup that originally emerged from Copenhagen, has now closed $75 million in Series C growth funding from Singapore’s Scentan Ventures. The company will use the new funds for global expansion, including developing and growing a new partnership with Scentan, initially in Japan. Tradeshift will also open offices in Tokyo. Tradeshift has raised $112 million to date. Previous investors included Notion Capital, Ru-net, Kite Ventures, Intuit and PayPal, while it has been backed by Angels including early Skype investor Morten Lund.
Scentan Ventures now gets exclusive product development, sales, marketing and service rights to the Tradeshift platform throughout Japan. Ultimately CEO and Co-founder Christian Lanng hopes to take the company to an initial public offering in about three years.
Tradeshift lets businesses send invoices and get payments from suppliers via its platform, using connections between companies to verify the transactions in a manner similar to social networks. The faster companies pay their suppliers, the better the discount is to use the platform. Its revenues are based on charging some clients a fee and charging third-party developers to use the platform.
The market for these kinds of companies is buoyant. In 2012 SAP acquired the business-to-business commerce network Ariba for $4.3 billion. Tradeshift’s San Francisco-based competitor Taulia recently raised $18 million in funding. Other competitors include Ariba, Basware, Coupa Software, OB10 and Dublin-based Senddr.
Launched in 2010, Tradeshift connects 500,000 companies across 190 countries, and claims to have over 10,000 join every month. Businesses on the platform include DHL, the National Health Service (NHS), the French government, CBRE and Vestas Wind Systems. Intuit, the Accounting software maker, uses Tradeshift to analyse customer data. It also has offices in Suzhou, China.