As an early backer, Scalare Partners are delighted to share the news of Cape’s successful pre-seed equity and debt raise of $33.1M and are thrilled to be supporting them on their mission to build a category-defining SaaS platform that helps SMEs achieve ‘complete expense nirvana’.
We are also excited to be one of their first customers to roll this product out across our own company and our portfolio.
What is Cape?
Cape is an expense management platform that issues corporate cards designed to help their customers cut wasteful spending and the time taken on financial administration work.
Through their software, Founders, CFO’s and Financial Controllers are able to fine-tune each employee’s card limits by the amount of funds available to spend, the times they can use the card and even the merchants they can or can’t spend with.
Post a payment, expense accounting is then a breeze with automated categorisation and real-time push data enrichment into their customers' General Ledger on Xero.
Why did Scalare invest?
The Market
Investing In Cape and Ryan Edwards-Pritchard was one of the easiest decisions we’ve ever had to make. What’s more, Cape’s market opportunity is enormous.
Businesses spend over $133 trillion each year globally, $2 trillion of that is on corporate cards.
Cape are taking on two fragmented, ancient and large industries and modernising them both with software by building a platform which combines expense management, corporate cards and traditional payment solutions together to replace the need for corporate cards such as American Express (market cap of $192 billion), and software providers such as Expensify ($2.1 billion market cap).
From an end-user perspective, the vision for Cape’s software is to transform the lives of those people entrusted to make spending decisions every day on behalf of their employer by building out the full finance stack.
CFO’s and finance teams have been embarrassingly underserved globally for some time now. Cape are focused on freeing up finance teams so they can focus on adding strategic value to help their company grow.
Cape is deeply passionate about addressing the under-served APAC market with a plan to grow from Australia to New Zealand, and then more broadly in the region.
Future global expansion would see Cape compete with the likes of Ramp (recently valued at $8bn), Brex, Pleo and Payhawk.
The Founder/Team
From the get-go, the Scalare team has been impressed with the Founder and CEO Ryan Edwards-Pritchard who has previously successfully overseen one of the biggest altfi platforms in Europe. Landing in Australia during the pandemic, he saw firsthand the overnight shift of modern businesses to remote working and the gap in digital tools that help companies adapt to thrive in the new environment.
Ryan is building an impressive team of dedicated brand advocates with deep banking and payments knowledge. The team includes CTO Julian Guppy, CPMO Andrew Fanner, CFO & COO Tanya Ward, and Chief Risk & Analytics Officer Rahul Pakrashi, who are all deep domain experts in their own fields and bring the technical and operational expertise needed to bring Cape to life.
Since our investment in Cape in January 2021, James Walker of Scalare Partners joined the cape board and has actively been working with Ryan and the broader Cape team to achieve Ryan's vision.
We are thrilled to be supporting Ryan and the entire Cape team on their journey to building an iconic company on the global stage. If you’re keen to join the Cape rocketship, check out their open roles on their website.
Get involved
Cape is built to help you see, manage and lower all types of business spending in real-time. If you want to start saving in under 5 minutes, then be sure to sign up for the Cape BETA waitlist today.
About Scalare
At Scalare, we’re on a mission to create a greater impact by building a collaborative network that connects exceptional founders, advisors and investors in a unique and powerful partnership, because real transformation and growth takes more than money.
Our unique collaboration and partnership model provides clear pathways to global investors, experts and markets. We plug existing skills gaps in our portfolio companies from our best-of-breed advisor network – to bring, expert resources exactly when needed to facilitate growth and deliver exceptional returns to investors and founders alike. Find out more >
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