Electronic Invoicing Startup Taulia Hires Silicon Valley Finance Veteran Rik Thorbecke As CFO

Fast on the heels of raising a $40 million Series D round of funding, electronic invoicing and supply chain financing startup Taulia has hired a CFO. Today the company is announcing that former Meltwater Group CFO Rik Thorbecke to handle all finance, legal, HR, and accounting operations and ahead of its ambitious plans for overseas expansion.

Taulia provides a platform for tracking all invoicing and payments made out to their suppliers. Targeting Fortune 500 customers, it helps them automate the process of invoicing and making payments which in turn lowers their costs. For suppliers, the platform helps them get paid faster by supplying short-term financing based on invoices that have been approved.

As invoicing follows other business processes into the cloud, it’s quickly gaining adoption among customers. And as it ramps up, the company hired Thorbecke to improve its own internal finance and HR processes.

Thorbecke has spent the last 25 years in various finance and strategy roles at a number of well-known companies. Most recently CFO of Meltwater, he has also served as CFO and Chief Strategy Officer of Plastic Logic and in VP roles at Levi Strauss and Electronic Arts in the mid-2000s. Prior to coming to Silicon Valley, Thorbecke spent more than 17 years at PricewaterhouseCoopers in the Netherlands, where he became a partner.

Thorbecke told me in a phone interview that he had been looking to join a company with a strong management team, as well as an opportunity for exponential growth. He noted that as more major companies are moving to SaaS-based systems to manage their financial systems, a dominant player hasn’t yet emerged in the supply chain segment. As a result, he argued that 2015 would be a breakout year for the company.

He comes to Taulia at a time of pretty significant growth already, with ambitious plans to expand even further. The company doubled headcount in 2014, as it grew to have more than $150 billion in annual spend passed through its platform. With that in mind, Thorbecke hopes to take Taulia from being a relatively small startup and making it into a global organization.

With a total of $70 million in funding, and $40 million that it has raised over the last six months, Taulia is looking to grow its international presence. It already has offices in San Francisco; London; Austin, Texas; Park City, Utah; Düsseldorf, Germany; and Sofia, Bulgaria, but expects to add more offices in the coming year.

Part of its recent funding came from Singapore’s Economic Development Board and BBVA Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Spain’s BBVA Group. That strategic investment is expected to help it add offices in Singapore and Latin America as it looks to find clients in those markets.

Thorbecke says that during that expansion, Taulia will most likely take a Salesforce-like approach to finding overseas customers. The company aims to focus on key specific markets rather than taking a more shotgun-like approach to being available all over the world.