Bronze at the TOP 100 Swiss Startup Award goes to Zurich-based Yokoy

The Fintech startup uses artificial intelligence to automate the entire corporate spending and corporate credit card process. Yokoy was founded in 2019 by Devis Lussi (CTO), Thomas Inhelder (CFO), Philippe Sahli (CEO), Melanie Gabriel (CMO), Lars Mangelsdorf (CCO) and was ranked 1st in 2022.

Philippe Sahli is a fast starter. At 24, he was a director at UBS, at 25 he was CFO at the former TOP 100 company Beekeeper, and at 27 he was one of the founders of Yokoy, together with Devis Lussi, Lars Mangelsdorf, Thomas Inhelder, and Melanie Gabriel – the latter was awarded HSG Founder of the Year in March on behalf of the team.“Our first goal was to simplify the expense reporting process for corporate clients,” recalls Sahli. The SaaS platform, which was launched in 2019, digitizes the entire process from receipt entry via smartphone to correct posting.

Yokoy has expanded its services since then. The platform also offers support for invoice management and the administration of employee credit cards. In other words, it automates the entire accounts payable management. The layperson may ask if one really needs software developed specifically for this. Are there no financial accounting modules in ERP systems from SAP, Oracle, Salesforce, and Microsoft? “The devil is in the detail,” explains Sahli. An invoice amount may consist of several hundred items: for example, cancellation fees or partial invoices for staggered deliveries. The art consists of so-called matching, in the correct posting of individual items in Dubacherthe financial accounting solution. “This is where we come in,” he says.

Thanks to the integrated AI components, the platform can be trained by customers; over time, it does the work fully automatically. In addition, the AI algorithms recognize deviations from the norm and provide information on abuse and attempted fraud. As easy-to-integrate software with interfaces to all common ERP systems, the market entry hurdles for Yokoy’s platform are comparatively low and it is currently used in 68 countries. Sales growth has been in the triple-digit percentage range for years, and the number of employees has increased by 50 to 250 over the last 12 months.

They are currently spread across six offices in Switzerland, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Serbia, and, since last October, Madrid. “We recruit talent where we find it,” comments Sahli. In the most recent financing round, in March 2022, the company from Zurich West received USD 80 million. Based on the rule of thumb that investors acquire about a quarter of the shares in a Series B round, this results in a company valuation of about CHF 400 million – and in only the fourth year of its existence.