artificial intelligence<\/a> startup that aims to be a one-stop shop for the financial needs \u200bof mid-sized business owners, said on Thursday it has raised $60 million \u200cin a Portage Ventures-led funding round.<\/p>\nThe Series B round valued the firm at around $500 million, \u200caccording to a person familiar with the deal. It takes Flex’s total equity raise to $105 million.<\/p>\n
The company said it is targeting “jumbo shrimps” \u2014 mid-sized profitable businesses earning between $2 million and $100 million a year \u2014 often overlooked by traditional fintech platforms and \u2060mainly served by regional \u200cbanks.<\/p>\n
Unlike AI startups looking to tackle specific tasks such as accounting or expense management, Flex aims to bundle private credit, \u200dbusiness finance, personal finance and payment tools into a single solution.<\/p>\n
“We have a very broad kind of product suite but an extremely narrow customer base,” founder and \u200bCEO Zaid Rahman told Reuters, noting many medium-sized businesses lack large finance \u200cteams that handle such tasks at bigger enterprises.<\/p>\n
“Our customer base are a few hundred thousand jumbo shrimp business owners. These business owners touch 40% of American payroll.”<\/p>\n
Despite a funding surge for AI startups, doubts remain about real-world adoption, with an MIT study earlier this year finding that only about 5% \u2060of AI projects advance beyond the pilot stage.<\/p>\n
Flex \u200bis trying to minimize inaccuracies by ensuring \u200bAI outputs are checked by financial experts. Growing adoption of its tools – which include a business credit card – has helped it \u200dtriple payments volume \u2060to $3 billion in 12 months.<\/p>\n
The company is launching a new invite-only consumer card called Flex Elite that would compete with Amex Centurion, typically \u2060used by high-net-worth individuals.<\/p>\n
It will use the new funds to accelerate product development and \u200cattract more clients by expanding its 80-member team.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Aditya Soni \u200cin Bengaluru; Editing by Sahal Muhammed)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Aditya Soni Dec 4 (Reuters) – Flex, an artificial intelligence startup that aims to be a one-stop…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":174786,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,95927,95926,95928,61,60,95925,174,80],"class_list":["post-174785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-business-credit-card","tag-business-finance","tag-flex","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mid-sized-business-owners","tag-personal-finance","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}