Teampay

What it Does

Teampay provides tools for a business’ employees to request or independently purchase goods and services with predefined limitations. One could describe this as a “modern” variation on e-procurement. Instead of a centralized procurement function building a catalog of approved items or service providers to use, employees in various functions identify and purchase what they need or seek approvals based on certain business rules.

In effect, this makes Teampay best applied to the categories of services and tail spend, allowing end users to make recurring or one time purchases that procurement or finance likely has too little time to effectively manage anyway. Teampay in particular emphasizes its ability to support purchases of services like SaaS subscriptions, a proliferating spend category that businesses increasingly find difficult to control.

See our full review of Teampay on Spend Matters PRO.

Why We Chose It

The term “spend management” may have originated in the early days of the internet, but the number of solutions purporting to address business spending, whether procurement-controlled or in general, continues to expand into the 2020s. And in the past several years, we’ve begun to see some fresh takes on what spend management could be — that is, not just catalog-based e-procurement or e-auctions. In particular, we’ve seen several vendors emerge that aim to simplify the process of finding, ordering and paying for items and services for end users, while enabling them to buy in a more self-service manner.

Tempay is one such solution, and several of its features present a convincing case for what the provider calls “distributed spend management.” Its ability to support intuitive, conversational requisitioning and automatic payments, while keeping end users within the boundaries of flexible business rules, creates a seamless user experience that many of its enterprise-grade peers might envy.

And given the challenges of managing a distributed workforce in 2020, we think of the choice of Teampay for this year’s Future 5 as a sign of the times. Investors think so, too: After having raised an initial Series A round in 2019, Teampay announced a Series A-1 extension of $5 million in October 2020, bringing its total funding to $21 million. Take it as sign of real momentum in the procurement-finance overlap space, as well as the alluring potential of creating easily usable solutions that appeal to the largely underserved SME market.

Any threats or challenges ahead?

There are two scenarios we think Teampay will need to address as it continues to scale: the growing glut of other similar vendors and the potential threat of P2P suites going “downmarket” with lite versions of their platforms.

For similarly sized competitors, Teampay has a fair amount of company. Examples include Airbase, Spendesk, Evergreen, Yaydoo, Yordex and Approve.com. Each of these vendors does something slightly different, but there is an odd amount of overlap in requisition management and virtual card provisioning. And perhaps more surprising still, several of these vendors are also gaining investor attention. On the one hand, this may indicate that this represents a fertile opportunity; on the other, it creates additional challenges for each vendor to differentiate and stand out from the crowd.

Then there’s the P2P threat. Coupa, Basware and other P2P top performers have more advanced capabilities and better funding that could be used to create “lite” versions of their tools targeted at the mid-market. This may sound far-fetched, but it’s a real possibility, given the market opportunity of addressing the underserved SME segment.

Still, Teampay has an early lead in defining and growing in this “spend management next” segment. Plus the vendor is actively addressing its own competitive threats. In our PRO analysis, we listed the rise of Amazon Business as a competitive threat, but the Teampay recently announced a partnership to use Amazon Business’ capabilities as a catalog management and content provider. This proactive mindset could be just what Teampay needs to differentiate itself, and it’s why the vendor is a Future 5 nominee for 2020.