Airbase and the Cost of Asking Too Late

Michael Zheng had arrived at Affinity to help plan the company’s future. First he had to discover what it had already bought. Employees used personal cards; expenses became visible when somebody submitted a report. The finance team’s view of the business therefore depended, in part, on other people remembering to do paperwork. An accounting system can be perfectly accurate and still tell you something rather late.

That delay is a useful way into Airbase. The company sold software for the space between wanting to buy something and recording it properly. Its wager was that approvals, cards, invoices and accounting should share a memory. Otherwise, the same purchase gets introduced to the company several times, like a guest nobody quite remembers inviting.

The question moved to the beginning

At Affinity, Zheng established pre-approval policies and trained employees on a different payment process. Requests reached the manager and finance before a subscription was purchased. The extra step initially added work, but the company’s account says employees came to appreciate the reduction in expense administration. Department heads could see their spending, too.

The revealing detail is the training. Software did not arrive and spontaneously manufacture discipline. Somebody changed the rules, explained them and gave employees a workable route through them. Airbase supplied the machinery. The organization supplied the decision to use it. For a buyer, that distinction matters more than another screenshot of a dashboard.

Imagine a department buying a software subscription. This is an illustration, not a reported customer transaction. Finance wants a budget code. Legal wants terms. Security wants to examine the vendor. The requester wants to get back to work. If these conversations happen independently, everybody can do their own job well while the purchase as a whole proceeds badly.

A card with a filing cabinet attached

Airbase’s four principal modules tackled different parts of that journey. Guided Procurement, introduced in April 2023, provided purchase intake and configurable review workflows. Its published integration documentation described requests triggering reviews in stakeholder tools, with the approval status returning to Airbase. The useful ambition was to let specialist teams participate without making every employee become a procurement specialist.

Accounts payable automation handles the invoice side: capture, coding, matching against purchase orders, approval and payment. Corporate cards attach limits and receipt requirements to employee spending. Expense management deals with money employees have already spent and need reimbursed. Accounting integrations carry the resulting records into the ledger.

These are familiar jobs. Airbase’s particular proposition was their connection. A card issuer can make payment convenient; an expense application can collect receipts; procurement software can organize approvals. Airbase wanted a purchase to travel between those functions with its explanation intact. That makes its expertise as much about accounting workflows and organizational permissions as about moving money.

The company also worked with existing card programs. Its American Express documentation described eligible virtual-card integration and corporate-card transaction syncing. In the historical Via customer story, the company kept its SVB cards. Changing the software did not necessarily mean changing the plastic. For finance teams, avoiding a card migration could be a rather practical inducement.

The savings began with a spring clean

Via’s published customer account describes fragmented systems, limited visibility and receipt delays. During onboarding, it reviewed software subscriptions and reported saving approximately 12.5% of its previous subscription costs. That is a company-specific result, and the cleanup is part of the explanation. A new platform created an occasion to question what the old stack was buying.

“When everyone takes ownership of their own spend, it takes so much work out of accounting’s hands.”

Connor Jones, senior corporate accountant at Via

There is a useful lesson here for a company that never buys Airbase: give recurring spending a named owner and a review date. Consolidating software is an opportunity to examine the subscriptions themselves. Moving an unexamined collection of purchases into a more attractive interface would preserve an expensive habit with improved typography.

At Aspire, controller Dmitri Litin evaluated the burden on employees and operating teams alongside the finance benefits. The published case study says its month-end close fell from 21 days to about half that length, and that it eliminated BILL from its stack. Those are reported outcomes from a vendor-published story, rather than a promise about another company’s close.

The middle of the market had a paperwork problem

Airbase was aimed at companies large enough to have complicated spending and small enough to feel the cost of each extra administrative task. In September 2024, Paylocity described its target as businesses with 100 to 5,000 employees and reported more than 500 clients. Finance was the buyer; employees and department managers had to live with the buying decision.

Its alternatives depended on which problem a company started with. Airbase’s historical pricing page named overlapping providers including Ramp and Brex for cards, BILL and Tipalti for payables, Expensify and Concur for expenses, and Coupa and Zip for procurement. That is a crowded set of neighboring markets. A broad platform has to justify the value of joining the jobs, rather than merely demonstrating that it can perform each one.

The commercial model was subscription software combined with cards and payments. Today, Paylocity quotes pricing for finance capabilities and allows module selection. For a prospective customer, the relevant cost includes the quoted package, payment terms, implementation effort and the tools it could retire. Cash back belongs in that calculation only under the applicable card conditions.

Two prices, seven years apart from the beginning

Thejo Kote founded Airbase in 2017 after co-founding Automatic, a connected-car business. The new company’s public vision was to bring non-payroll spending into a cohesive experience. Its own distributed working habits were also deliberate: in a 2021 founder interview, Kote emphasized documentation and asynchronous work alongside live collaboration.

In June 2021, Airbase announced a $60 million Series B led by Menlo Ventures at a $600 million valuation, bringing reported venture funding to $91 million. A later $150 million Goldman Sachs credit facility supported the charge-card program. Lending capacity for cards and equity invested in a software company are different kinds of capital; adding them together disguises what each is for.

Then came Paylocity’s September 2024 announcement: an approximately $325 million cash acquisition, subject to adjustments. It closed on October 1. The earlier financing valuation and announced purchase price belong to different transactions. Neither number, by itself, tells a complete story about investor returns or the condition of the business.

Paylocity’s strategic reasoning was explicit. Payroll covered labor spending; Airbase supplied capabilities for the other spending. Bringing them together could widen the relationship with HR and finance buyers. That is the buyer’s stated rationale, not evidence that every integration benefit has already been achieved. Airbase’s current website points visitors toward Paylocity, whose finance platform retains the core spend categories.

Try it with the awkward purchase

The sensible demonstration starts with a purchase your team finds annoying: a recurring vendor, several approvers, an invoice that needs matching, perhaps a subsidiary with different accounting requirements. Watch where the information goes. Can the right people approve it? Does the record reach the ledger with the right coding? Who handles an exception?

Those questions also define the limits of the approach. A small team with few purchases may get little value from a broad workflow. A business whose necessary integrations or payment arrangements do not fit needs to resolve that before committing. And a card lock does not cancel a subscription contract, as Airbase’s American Express documentation expressly warns. Software can stop a charge; contractual obligations require attention of their own.

Airbase’s most transferable idea is consequently quite modest: make responsibility visible while a decision can still be changed. Ask who owns the purchase before asking who can find the receipt. It is a small alteration in the order of events, with a potentially large effect on everybody’s afternoon.