Carnival in the Cloud: Taulia Innovates in Supplier Management and Invoicing

A TechNavio report forecasts the global e-invoicing market to grow 24.2% annually over the period 2012 through 2016. The growth in the market was attributed to the increased adoption of these services by small and medium enterprises and the continued focus on reduction of operational costs. San Francisco-based Taulia is one such fast growing company that has gone beyond simple invoicing to encompass an impressive vendor management offering.

Taulia’s Offerings

Taulia was founded in 2009 to provide a cloud-based invoice, payment, and dynamic discounting management solution that would help improve business interactions across organizations. Taulia realizes that organizations are consistently looking for ways to improve the performance of their invoicing and payables processes. Besides e-invoicing, their Business Exchange offering provides a simple platform that automates and optimizes both the payment and discount management processes.

Organizations are able to deploy innovative features such as Dynamic Discounting on all invoices for implementation of early payment discounts. The feature helps in better cash flow management for both buyers and suppliers as the supplier is able to choose a marginally discounted rate to pay an invoice earlier than its due date.

They also offer an Enhanced Discounting service that is a one-of-a-kind flexible supplier financing solution that lets organizations customize the supplier financing offering to fit supply chain requirements. The service allows organizations to pay the supplier through funding from a third-party financial institution.

Their supplier self-service tools improve supplier collaboration by addressing all forms of communication, information and transaction processing. Their ePay solution integrates into existing ERP systems so that organizations are able to see payment visibility and eliminate processing costs and transaction fees.

Taulia has seen rapid adoption of their services. They have over half a million business relationships on their network and have processed more than $150 billion in spend and 20 million invoices annually through their platform. Their customer list includes big names like Coca-Cola, Pfizer, Hallmark and other Fortune 500 companies.

Taulia’s Financials

Taulia earns revenues by charging suppliers a percentage of the invoice amount. They do not disclose their financial performance, but they do disclose the impressive growth percentages. For fiscal 2013 and 2014, Taulia saw revenues triple over the year and for the first quarter of this year, revenues have grown 2.5 times over the year.

They have been venture funded so far with $90.7 million in investments from investors including Zouk Capital LLP, BBVA Ventures, EDBI, QuestMark Partners, DAG Ventures, Lakestar, Matrix Partners, SEB Private Equity, Trinity Ventures, Matrix Partners, TELUS Ventures, and David Wu. Their latest round of funding was held in January 2015 when they raised $15 million from Zouk Capital at an undisclosed valuation. Analysts expect that Taulia is planning to go public by the year 2016 at a valuation of over $1 billion.

You can read about many other entrepreneurs who have built successful cloud businesses in my book Carnival In The Cloud and here on my blog.

This segment is a part in the series : Carnival in the Cloud