Dive Brief:

• Spend management platform Extend Enterprises tapped a former PayPal Holdings executive, Francois Horikawa, to serve as its first CFO, the company said Thursday as it also raised $20 million in fresh capital. Horikawa joins Extend as the company seeks to reach profitability, according to a press release.
• Horikawa, a finance executive in PayPal’s consumer business unit, will help Extend “transform its economic model and diversify its revenue streams,” Guillaume Bouvard, Extend’s co-founder, chief operating officer and chief marketing officer, said in an emailed statement.
• New York-based Extend said the new capital included 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.  

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 American Express.   

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 a $40 million round 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.”

Extend 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. 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.

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.