For obvious reasons, financial teams can spend a great deal of time on corporate treasury management, accounting and bank reconciliation, so anything that speeds up that process usually garners a lot of interest.
Today Embat, a Spanish fintech which does what they call “real-time treasury management,” has closed a financing round of $16 million Series A led by Creandum. Also participating was Spanish VC Samaipata, 4Founders and Venture Friends in Greece.
Angels investing in the round included Kilian Thalhammer (head of Deutsche Bank) and Martin Blessing (former CEO of Commerzbank).
Co-founders Antonio Berga, Carlos Serrano (both former JP Morgan executives) and Tomás Gil started the company in 2021 to digitize and automate process for finance teams. Their solution automates accounting and bank reconciliation, and deals with corporate treasury management, centralizing collections, payments and treasury processes, thus saving time, says the startup.
It claims to have 150 corporate clients across Europe, including Playtomic, Cabify, Wallapop and Fever. Last year Embat partnered with Google Cloud’s Vertex AI platform in an effort to reduce errors for accounting teams.
Tomás Gil, co-founder and CTO of Embat, said the company has “significantly improved” its accounting and bank reconciliation module and was now applying AI to its platform.
However, its competitors include Kyriba and Sage XRT. But a startup it competes with in the U.S. is Trovata, which has raised $57.6 million to date and is now post-Series B.
The solution has been bought by National Australia Bank and J.P. Morgan.
Co-founder Antonio Berga said he would not comment on competitors but did tell me: “From a broad perspective we are driven by APIs versus traditional protocols like SWIFT. This allows clients to connect globally and it saves a lot of money. Secondly, we do automated cash accounting, so all the treasury, without doing this manually in the ERP.”