Fintech startup Tipalti is focused on ways that artificial intelligence can further automate corporate finance, spurring customer growth that positions the company for an eventual public stock offering, its president said.

Tipalti expects to reach sustained profitability by early 2027, which is “one of the gating factors for us to go IPO in the future, of course,” President Rob Israch said in a June 16 interview. Beyond financials, he added, “you want the market to be in a good place for an IPO, so there’s a sentiment piece to it.”

Tipalti sells finance-automation software for corporate functions including accounts payable, payments, procurement and expense management and processes about $90 billion in total payment volume.

In September, Foster City, California-based Tipalti said that annual recurring revenue had topped $200 million. It offered that financial performance metric as a data point when it raised $200 million from Hercules Capital. 

The company has grown to about 1,000 employees since its 2010 founding. Tipalti competes in different industry verticals against firms such as AvidXchange, Coupa and Ramp.

Fintech valuations have floundered in recent years as investors have adopted a stricter approach to the metrics by which they judge companies. Investors now look beyond just growth to assess cash burn, customer acquisition costs, customer feedback and a company’s exposure to AI disruption, Israch said.

Investors “kind of want everything perfect,” he said.

Tipalti isn’t focused on being acquired and sees a stock offering as its most likely path, said Israch, a former executive at NetSuite, the Oracle-owned enterprise software company, and Intuit’s QuickBooks.

Like many of its peers in business-finance automation, Tipalti is leaning heavily into artificial intelligence tools integrated within its solutions. Customers are requesting such AI tools because of pressure from their senior leadership and boards to leverage AI tools, Israch said.

“They prefer that their current vendors offer AI within their stack,” he said. “Customers are definitely engaging on that, like they want to know what we're doing on the (AI) roadmap side – almost relieve them from doing it.”

Currently, about 80% of Tipalti’s 6,500 customers have automated their regular payments and that is likely to rise over time with new AI capabilities, he said.

Over time, as AI handles most of the operational side of corporate finance, that function becomes more forward-looking, Israch predicted. Finance teams will be smaller but more focused on planning and analysis.

“You’re still going to need some judgment, and you're still going to need some guiding (of) the C-suite on decision making, even more so to a degree, because now we have that richness in data, but you still have to make judgment calls with it,” he said.