Dive Brief:

• Spend management platform Extend tapped PayPal alum Francois Horikawa to serve as its first CFO, the company confirmed to CFO Dive in an email. His appointment comes as the company seeks to accelerate a path to profitability, according to a Thursday press release.
• Horikawa will “draw on his experience in partnership, pricing and strategic planning” to help Extend “transform its economic model and diversify its revenue streams. He will also focus on strengthening the processes, infrastructure and financial discipline of the company as it scales,” Guillaume Bouvard, co-founder, chief operating officer and chief marketing officer of Extend told CFO Dive in an emailed statement.
• Also Thursday, the New York-based company announced it secured $20 million in additional capital including new venture debt and an equity investment by B Capital. The venture round also included participation from March Capital, Point72 Ventures, Fintech Collective and Commerce Ventures. The round will provide Extend with “additional financial flexibility while allowing the company to continue to invest” and build out its platform, Bouvard said. 

Dive Insight:

Extend, which offers an expense management platform that helps businesses manage virtual cards and reconcile expenses, will lean on Horikawa’s financial expertise to “help steer Extend toward operational excellence and sustainable profitability in its next phase of growth,” according to the release.

Horikawa is joining the spend management platform after eight years at PayPal, where he recently served as head of finance for its consumer business unit, which includes its peer-to-peer payments services, Venmo, credit and debit cards and small business lending units, according to his LinkedIn profile. His previous experience includes five years at card provider American Express, where he served as VP and lead financial officer, board director for its Australia Limited business.   

The PayPal veteran will assume the CFO seat at Extend as the spend management platform seeks to offer new products and utilize its new funding round to help the business scale up its issuer partners, according to the release. Extends’s most recent funding round brings the company’s total amount raised since its founding in 2017 to approximately $74 million, following after a $40 million Series B in 2021 led by March Capital, according to data from Crunchbase.

The round “represents a pivotal moment for Extend as we accelerate our path to profitability and launch our paid SaaS offering,” Extend CEO Andrew Jamison said in a statement included in the Thursday release, noting the company is continuing to focus on “capital efficiency and deepening our relationships across the banking ecosystem.”       

The company has taken several steps this year to continue a recent growth streak as it hopes to establish a dominant space in the growing virtual corporate card market. A May report by Juniper Research predicted the value of business-to-business virtual card payments will hit $14.6 trillion by 2029 — a figure representing 83% of the total global virtual card market. In 2025, B2B payments will comprise 76% of the $5.2 trillion market, according to the Juniper report.

Extend has moved to capture a growing segment of that market; in 2024, the company reported a 35% increase year-over-year in the number of businesses using its virtual card platform in 2024, according to a January press release, serving more than 10,000 businesses across the U.S. and Canada.

This year, the company has launched new tools to utilize artificial intelligence technologies, launching an AI “toolkit” in May for businesses to better support finance automation solutions. In March, Extend announced it had entered into a referral agreement with card network Visa, enabling middle market companies to access Visa-supported virtual card solutions, according to a press release.