Blake Murray put the expense report on notice

An expense report has an exquisite sense of timing. It tells you what you spent after the money has gone, then asks you to admire the paperwork. Blake Murray had spent enough time reconciling the past. Running a restaurant business, he wanted to know what was happening while there was still time to do something about it. The dissatisfaction became Divvy, the company he co-founded with Alex Bean in 2016. Five years later, Bill.com bought it for approximately $2.5 billion in cash and stock. Quite a journey for a complaint about receipts.

The purchase price gives the story its large type. Murray’s more interesting contribution sits underneath: he treated the gap between spending money and understanding that spending as a product problem. A business owner should be able to set a budget, distribute purchasing power and see the consequences together. The corporate card and the software could belong to the same experience. Finance, in this arrangement, might finally arrive before the guests had left.

A career with several exits before the entrance

Murray’s route into financial technology was indirect. He studied environmental studies at the University of Utah, worked with wildlife in Africa, tried law school and an MBA program, and pursued a career with the CIA. He later worked in commercial real estate and joined Weave, the communications company co-founded by his cousin Brandon Rodman. A tidy professional biography would require rather vigorous pruning.

He also grew up close to the technology business. His father, Mike Murray, worked at Apple and Microsoft. Yet proximity to famous companies did not produce an immediate vocation. Blake’s early interests took him well beyond an office, and his eventual business education included ventures that disappointed him. The restaurant experience supplied something a prestigious introduction could never guarantee: a problem he personally wanted solved.

His own description of Divvy’s beginning has consistently centered on frustration. Existing tools could document spending, but the information arrived too late to help him run the business as he wished. That distinction matters. A receipt is useful evidence. A decision about whether a team can afford another purchase requires something more immediate. Murray had found himself on the receiving end of the difference.

The money needed a shorter journey

In 2018, Murray described the irritation of reconciling reports while the underlying numbers kept changing. Revenue could be watched as it happened. Expenses remained awkwardly behind. He and Bean spent nearly two years developing their answer before bringing the platform to market in January 2018. The apparently sudden arrival had a substantial stretch of work concealed behind it.

The promise was practical. Give employees corporate cards connected to centrally managed budgets. Let managers allocate money and adjust limits. Record transactions as they occur. Use virtual cards for subscriptions and other online purchases. An employee needing more spending authority could request it through the system, rather than begin a small correspondence course in office permission.

Bringing those pieces together required more than an agreeable screen. Banks, card infrastructure and business software had to cooperate. The early team was selling a connected experience whose components lived in different institutions. Every clean interaction on a phone depended on work that its eventual user would have little reason to notice.

The ambition becomes clearer when considered from a small company’s desk. Buying something for work can involve a personal card, an expense submission, a reimbursement and a later reconciliation. Divvy’s approach moved control toward the beginning of the purchase. Permission and visibility could travel with the money. A finance team would have less historical detective work to perform.

Free software, with a card attached

Murray and Bean also made a consequential commercial choice: the expense software was free. Revenue came through card transactions and the sharing of interchange fees. That put the business model close to the behavior the product was designed to support. Customers using the cards created a revenue opportunity for Divvy while gaining access to the accompanying tools.

Free, of course, is an excellent opening line. It still leaves the harder questions of adoption, usefulness and continued use. An account that sits untouched provides little evidence that a product has become part of a business. Divvy needed people to make purchases through its system and finance teams to trust the resulting information.

By July 2018, it had more than 700 companies signed up. Insight Venture Partners led a $35 million Series B that month. In April 2019, a $200 million round led by NEA followed, with Pelion and Insight participating. Divvy’s announcement put its customer base near 3,000 businesses, fifteen months after launch.

Those numbers help explain why investors paid attention. They also reveal how unglamorous the underlying opportunity was. Divvy was competing for a place in the everyday machinery of a company: budgets, subscriptions, employee purchases and the reconciliation of accounts. The product’s appeal depended on repeated usefulness, well after the funding announcement had lost its novelty.

The founder who recruited through Twitter

Murray’s tastes in business education were less conventional than a shelf of leadership books might suggest. In 2020, he said Twitter had changed his life and helped him recruit important leaders. The same preference for immediacy that animated the product showed up in his reading habits. Advice, too, could be more useful before it had been bound in hardback.

“We believe that the future of banking is software-led.”

Blake Murray, 2020

The line connects his operating preferences with his view of the market. He wanted financial services to be experienced through useful software, with fewer obstacles between a business and its money. It is a broad ambition with a very ordinary test: can somebody finish the task more efficiently?

His view of hiring also reached beyond his own company. Renato Villanueva, who later co-founded Parallel, described Murray as an important mentor. At Divvy, Murray encouraged people who encountered problems to think like founders and build solutions. Villanueva carried that approach into a startup addressing financial forecasting. An instruction to take ownership had acquired a life outside its original office.

There is a useful tension here. A founder wants employees to make the company work, yet teaching them to spot an opportunity can eventually send them elsewhere. The resulting relationships may become part of the return. A company produces software; it can also produce people who are less willing to accept an irritating process as permanent.

Two very different numbers in 2021

January 2021 brought a $165 million Series D at a $1.6 billion valuation. New investors included PayPal Ventures, Hanaco, Whale Rock and Schonfeld. The planned use of the money included product development and engineering. The company was still raising capital to build when the next chapter became a transaction.

On June 1, Bill.com completed the acquisition for approximately $2.5 billion in stock and cash. The buyer wanted to combine Divvy’s spend-management capabilities with its own financial operations platform for small and midsize businesses. Murray’s original concern about disconnected financial tasks had found a larger corporate home.

The distinction between those January and June figures deserves care. One was a funding valuation; the other was the announced acquisition value. Neither is a statement of Murray’s personal wealth. Founding a company, raising outside money and selling it involve different ownership interests. The headline is large enough without borrowing someone else’s arithmetic.

After the sale, a different kind of participation

Murray’s relationship with BILL continued after the acquisition and subsequently changed. In September 2022, he moved from chief revenue officer to advisor to the CEO. The transition arrangements provided for employment through January 1, 2023, followed by an anticipated advisory period. His accurate identifying title today is co-founder and former CEO of Divvy.

His name has also appeared on the investing side of the table. In August 2024, he was among the angel investors named in Redo’s $24 million Series A. Bean participated too. Redo had drawn several former Divvy team members, making the round another meeting point for people who had already worked together.

That June, Murray appeared on the I/O Podcast with former Divvy leaders Tyler Hogge and Sterling Snow. The conversation returned to the original product insight, hiring, performance and the sacrifices of building a company. Years after the transaction, there was still plenty to discuss about how the work had actually been done.

The receipt, reconsidered

In a later guest talk, Murray connected Divvy’s origins to his faith and a promise to use his time and resources in service of others. His account put purpose alongside effort. He advised the audience to keep improving, allow themselves some grace and recognize that a life’s ambitions need not arrive simultaneously.

The episodes fit together without requiring a perfectly straight career line. A student interested in the environment became an operator annoyed by financial administration. A shared frustration became a product built with a childhood friend. Employees went on to start companies of their own; former colleagues reappeared as fellow investors and interview companions.

Murray’s story leaves a pleasantly practical thought behind. Before an expense became a report, it was a decision. He built a company around giving that decision a better set of tools. For anyone who has ever hunted for a receipt while the business moved on without them, the attraction needs very little translation.