Somewhere in every growing company, there is a spreadsheet. It tracks who owes money, who is owed money, and which invoices have gone quiet. It has a name like Collections_2024_FINAL_final_v3, and one person understands it. When that person goes on holiday, the money stops moving. Peakflo, a Singapore company founded in 2021 and pulled into Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch, built a business out of retiring that file.
The pitch, in the words TechCrunch used, was "Bill.com for Southeast Asia." That framing is useful and also a little unfair. Bill.com is the American reference point for automating how businesses pay and get paid. But the founders, CEO Saurabh Chauhan and CTO Dmitry Vedenyapin, were not chasing a copy. They had noticed something specific: roughly 99% of the customers they talked to were running payments and invoicing on spreadsheets. Not a legacy tool they wanted to replace. A blank grid.
01 / WHAT IT ACTUALLY DOESMoney in, money out, and the glue between
Peakflo is best understood as four layers stacked into one workspace. There is accounts receivable - the money coming in - which handles invoice collections, dispute management, customer payment portals and reconciliation. There is accounts payable - the money going out - which captures vendor bills, routes approvals and runs three-way matching so a payment matches its purchase order and receipt. There is a payments layer that actually moves the cash, domestically and across borders. And there is an integration layer that plugs the whole thing into a company's accounting software and ERP.
The order matters. Peakflo did not build all four at once. It started with receivables, spending more than a year - from late 2020 into 2022 - assembling the collections stack before it added payables. Getting paid came first because getting paid is where growing companies feel the pain most sharply.
Figures reported by Peakflo. Treat as company-provided, directional metrics.
02 / WHO BUYS ITFinance teams drowning in email
The customers are finance teams at fast-growing startups and mid-sized companies, concentrated in Southeast Asia and the wider APAC region. These are businesses big enough to have real invoice volume but not big enough to have an army of accountants or a six-figure enterprise suite. At Y Combinator the company was doing about $13,000 in monthly recurring revenue and adding 10 to 15 customers a month. By mid-2022 it had crossed 50 customers; it now reports more than 100 finance teams on the platform.
03 / THE PROBLEMCash flow is the real product
It is tempting to describe Peakflo as software that saves time. That undersells it. The thing a finance team is actually buying is cash flow. An invoice paid 20 days sooner is payroll met, a hire made, a runway extended. When Peakflo says customers get paid 15 to 25 days faster and cut vendor payment time roughly in half, the value is not "less admin." It is money arriving before it is needed rather than after.
04 / HOW IT'S DIFFERENTLocal-first, ERP-native, now agentic
Three things separate Peakflo from the incumbents. First, geography: it was built for Southeast Asia's payment rails and cross-border realities rather than retrofitted from a US template. Second, integration: one-click connections to SAP, NetSuite, Xero, QuickBooks and Sage mean it slots into existing systems without a data migration project - a deal-breaker for lean finance teams. Third, timing: in 2025 the company shipped a "20x Agent Orchestrator," an AI layer that reads invoices, matches them and moves approvals along, positioning Peakflo as an AI-native alternative to older AP/AR tools.
05 / THE BUSINESS MODELTwo margins, one platform
Peakflo makes money two ways, and they behave very differently. The software subscription carries gross margins around 85% - the classic SaaS economics. The payments business, where Peakflo takes a slice of volume moving through the platform, runs closer to 40%. That blend is deliberate: the high-margin software creates stickiness, and the payment flows create a second revenue line that grows with the customer's own volume.
06 / THE MARKETWhere Peakflo sits
In the finance automation landscape, Peakflo competes with global names - Bill.com as the archetype, Tipalti and Medius on the payables side, Versapay and YayPay on receivables. But its most common competitor is not a company at all. It is the spreadsheet and the shared inbox. That is a comfortable place to be a wedge: too small for the enterprise incumbents to bother localizing, too painful for the customer to keep doing by hand. The seed syndicate - Y Combinator, Soma Capital, Global Founders Capital, Rebel Fund, Amino Capital, Entrepreneur First, GMO VenturePartners, CreditEase and angel Amrish Rau - bought that thesis in 2022.
07 / THE PEOPLEA CEO and a CTO, four values
Peakflo is led by Saurabh Chauhan, its co-founder and CEO, and Dmitry Vedenyapin, co-founder and CTO. The team - around 31 people - describes itself as product-first and runs on four stated values: be customer-driven, make it happen, collaborate, and foster meritocracy. It is a small group for the surface area it covers, which is part of why the ERP integrations and AI agents matter: the software has to do the work a bigger headcount otherwise would.