The Keys To Building An $8.3 Billion Fintech Company

Tipalti is an Israeli-based accounts payable fintech company. Their name comes from the Hebrew expression—we handled it. The fintech company raised $270 million at a valuation over $8.3 billion in an effort to transform and disrupt this sector. 

Chen Amit, co-founder and CEO of Tipalti said about the investment, “This latest investment will enable Tipalti to add more to our product lines and capabilities in the next 18 months than we have over the past 10 years combined,” and “we are on a journey to transform financial operations, relieve finance leaders from those mundane, cumbersome, risky tasks, and elevate the financial capabilities for high velocity organizations to rival those of the Fortune 5000.”

Thousands of companies, including Amazon Twitch, GoDaddy, Roku, WordPress.com, and ZipRecruiter use the services of Tipalti. They currently process over $30 billion in total annual payments volume — growing 120% year over year. 

This is only part of the story. We read reports of companies worth multi billions on an almost daily basis. What we don’t often know is what goes on behind the scenes. How does a company go from one person to hundreds of employees and thousands of customers? 

Chen Amit comes across in our video conversation as a humble and friendly Isreali entrepreneur. Despite his relaxed demeanor, the cofounder of Tipalti, together with Orez Zeev, started rapidly changing global payables by making it easier for customers by deploying automation and controls, and getting rid of pain points. 

Amit is a veteran high-tech executive and intrepid business builder. Prior to Tipalti, Amit was the CEO of Atrica, a carrier ethernet company that Nokia-Siemens acquired. Before Atrica, Chen was co-founder and CEO of Verix, a provider of business intelligence software. He earned a BS from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology and an MBA from INSEAD. He also made a modest living playing poker for a year in-between entrepreneurial endeavors. 

Amit freely shared his leadership and management style that enabled the invoice and supplier payments company to thrive. Instead of going into the minutiae of his business, Amit animatedly shared his insider tips about how he built, managed and leads his company.

He personally interviewed and hired the initial employees. Now that it has around 800 workers, human resources helps with the hiring. The reason for his hands-on approach was because Amit wanted to build a strong culture. By meeting everyone, he could ensure the right fit for what he’s creating. It starts at the top. Executives will set the tone so it’s important to get the right people into these C-suite roles. If mistakes are made, quickly make a change. Culture is about doing , and you need to walk the talk, he says. If you see good things happening, recognize, reward and amplify it. 

He does not subscribe to the worn out cliche of following your passion. Chen was not passionate about accounts payable. He didn’t even know much about the sector. A friend of his said Chen was a ‘garbage collector’ casting doubt on his efforts to found a startup in this space. 

NYU professor, former investment banker and podcast host Scott Galloway famously offered a great insight into the concept of following your passion saying, “People often come to NYU and say, ‘Follow your passion’ — which is total bulls—-, especially because the individual telling you to follow your passion usually became magnificently wealthy selling software as a service for the scheduling of health care maintenance workers. And I refuse to believe that that was his or her passion.” 

Galloway says that once your skills, background and talents align with a job or business, “you start making money, then a lot of money, you become passionate about the job or company.” The investment banker turned guru said, “What they were passionate about was being great at something, and then the accouterments of being great at something — the recognition from colleagues, the money, the status will make you passionate about whatever it is.” Now that Amit is comfortably rich and successful, he loves the overlooked space that his friend derisively called ‘garbage.’

A lesson learned is to go where the puck is going, not where it’s been, taken from Wayne Gretzky, the star hockey player. His company performs a simple task, making sure bills and invoices are promptly paid. Since this doesn’t have sex appeal, other entrepreneurs stayed away from this space, which allowed Amit to build an empire. 

Amit saw an opportunity that others didn’t. He set out to change a staid, low-tech and in-person job function to a single cloud AI-powered platform. The company uniquely offers one-stop shopping-from invoice to payment. This empowered his customers to handle just about all types of payments such as various currencies and automatic payments. The platform can now manage thousands of payments in almost 200 countries. 

He figured out that by using a software as a service model, his customers could cut down on all the tedious manual work, especially the smaller businesses he started with. This freed up workers to focus on higher-level mission critical activities instead of being drained with back-office paperwork. It also eliminated compliance, money laundering, fraud and tax risks for the small business owners. The payment methods, entities, currenis and activities are all reconciled in real-time to provide management instant visibility.

Amit calls for having a clean slate, which in Zen Buddhism is called a beginners mindset. You enter an occupation or business enterprise without bringing along any preconceived notions. You don’t have the “it’s always been done this way mindset,” which frees you up from conformity.  Going into the unglamorous relatively low-tech involving and receivables space, Amit didn’t have any preconceived notions. It was a sleepy area and he injected life into it by aggressively pursuing one client after another. 

Ignorance is Bliss. He was a one person company. Amit jokingly bragged that his small company quickly doubled when he hired his first employee. Amit didn’t realize that the market for small and mid sized companies was so underserved and wide open. In the U.S. alone, mid-market companies, with revenues between $10 million and $1 billion, account for more than one-third of employment and about 40% of GDP.  

Don’t knock your head against the wall. If your niche already has a name for the vertical, it’s too late. You don’t want to be the 15th company in the buy now pay later space. Find a wide open space that doesn’t already have a moniker to become the leader.

When it comes to leading people, Amit trusts and respects them. He also challenges his staff. Amit pushes them to reach and work outside of their comfort zone, until they become comfortable being uncomfortable. 

With good humor and drive, Tipalti  is now ranked 15th globally in valuation for private fintech companies. It passed the 2,000-customer mark, opened new offices in London, U.K.; Plano, Texas; and Toronto, Ontario, and has grown to over 700 employees worldwide. 

Tipalti ranked on both the 2021 Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies in the U.S. and the Deloitte Fast 500 for the fourth consecutive year, won Best Accounts Payable Software 2021 by TrustRadius, and was named a Worldwide Leader by IDC Marketscape in Midmarket Accounts Payable Automation.

Not too bad for a guy who didn’t know anything about small companies handling invoices and paying suppliers.