theCUBE + NYSE Wired: C-Suite Business Transformation | Oded Zehavi, Mesh

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Oded Zehavi

CEO & Co-Founder

Mesh

play_circle_outline Corporate Card Platform Scales as Business Travel Rebounds and T&E Reaches 20% After SoFi Partnership

play_circle_outline Real-Time AI Spend Orchestration: ERP, HR, Travel Integration, Automated Expense Processing

play_circle_outline Combines fintech and software to displace legacy banks and legacy travel/expense platforms.

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Oded Zehavi, Mesh

Oded Zehavi

CEO & Co-Founder Mesh

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(INTRO)

John Furrier

>> John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here in the NYSE theCUBE studios. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. This is our Business Transformation Series, where we talk to the leaders who are making it happen and bringing the AI era to business. As business models transform, you got to measure it, you got to understand the operations, you got to tie it all together, you got to have agents running around. Of course, our leaders here are going to unpack that. Oded Zehavi here, CEO and co -founder of Mesh, a company doing a lot of work in the T &E platform area. Again, in finance, that's one thing, but also more broadly that hits everyone, great to see you, thanks for coming in.

John Furrier

>> Thank you for having me.

John Furrier

>> All right, explain what Mesh does and we'll get into it.

Oded Zehavi

>> So Mesh's vision is to make T &E invisible. the T &E space has been disrupted post -COVID. A lot of things have changed. Business travel is totally back, but people need to leverage AI to make T &E as automated as possible. People are tired of getting all these receipts, coming back from their business trip, and start filling out all these complicated forms.

John Furrier

>> Take a picture, explain everything.

Oded Zehavi

>> So again, the combination of the advancements in expense management, in business travel and AI and the FinTech space that we've started with the payment side, that's what creates the magic and Mesh is one of the players in that space.

John Furrier

>> So you guys started out as a payment company, right? In 2019?

John Furrier

>> Correct.

John Furrier

>> And then how did you get into the T&E? What was the journey?

Oded Zehavi

>> So COVID really changed the expense space in a way that before COVID it was all about T&E and during COVID, T&E was eliminated overnight. So a lot of the challenges that companies have faced then was companies become remote and global, and they need to pay for SaaS services, and they needed what we call next-generation corporate cards. And we were one of the players that built those platforms that really disrupted the traditional corporate cards that are still common, like the bank cards, but we have been building a platform that allows the companies all the flexibility, the control, the visibility in real time of spend. We were fortunate that we have been partnering with one of the biggest financial institutions in the U.S., which is SoFi, which is our sponsor. And we service hundreds of thousands of corporations and gave them what they need in order to fulfill the payment.

John Furrier

>> So you saw an opportunity and you went after it. SoFi was in the market. They were a partner.

Oded Zehavi

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> And that enabled you to do what you do.

Oded Zehavi

>> Correct. Correct. And now fast forwarding, T &E is back, and T &E has become a very dominant, almost 20 % of the company's budget is now on T &E, and we've shifted a lot of the technology from doing something that is relatively generic to something that's really helped the company on a contextual basis and help them fulfill their mission.

John Furrier

>> Oded, the SoFi of the world, you got SoFi, you got Robinhood, So these are brands that cater to the younger generation. They wanted better user experience, . How much was that a factor in what you did? Or was it more the workflows? What was the key?

Oded Zehavi

>> I think the key for companies is first and foremost the workflows. Again, they look for the technology, they look for the automation, they look for the saving of time and money. Then the fact that you are coming with a strong financial infrastructure that people can relate to, that's really a bonus but at the end of the day if we look back 20 years ago nobody would have thought that they will not get their card from J.P. Morgan and today more people will prefer to get this from the next generation platform and not from a traditional legacy commercial bank so take me through the process the old corporate cards what's the new model take me through say I wanted to do

John Furrier

>> this I'm a customer potential customer I got about 200 employees they're all traveling around, what would I do? What's the product?

Oded Zehavi

>> So, a typical onboarding on the Mesh platform includes first and foremost connecting the Mesh platform to your entire financial back office. So we will connect in real time to your ERP, we'll connect in real time to your HR system, we'll connect in real time to the travel agency or the way you book your flights, and then we'll orchestrate all of that in real time. So now, from the minute you start operating, every employee is eligible to get a card, but he can also expense with his own personal card or with the traditional corporate card.

John Furrier

>> Can I get points on travel?

Oded Zehavi

>> You can leave your, some of what we've seen, one of the advantages of Mesh compared to some of the competitors in the market is that we are not forcing you to replace all your cards with Mesh cards, we are telling you, you can leave some of your executives that are addicted to their existing Amex card or JPMorgan card to feed those cards into our platform while some of the newer people might want a more controlled card with more visibility, which we offer. So it's really about leaving you the flexibility but making everything in real time. And now this infrastructure allows you to connect all your AI systems and leverage our AI technology in order to save you time and money.

John Furrier

>> All right, question, what's the floor, the minimum size customer and systems that have to be in place for them to be a customer?

Oded Zehavi

>> So we usually say that the complexity starts in an organization when you go above 10 employees. And it's really, I think the next milestone is 50 employees. We are mostly focused, even though we have a lot of SMBs as our customers, of course, our main focus is on the mid -market and above.

John Furrier

>> So you can serve that company that's growing out of QuickBooks into another system.

Oded Zehavi

>> Totally. We work with QuickBooks, with SAP, we work with NetSuite, which is the largest player in the mid -market. for us, and a lot of our customers, by the way, might have multiple ERPs and multiple HR systems if they are in multiple jurisdictions. So the market is still totally underserved.

John Furrier

>> Geography's a huge issue.

Oded Zehavi

>> Totally, totally. It's so different going back to travel, the way people in the US travel, and especially people in Europe travel, and I'm not even talking about India. So you need a platform that can adjust to all these different experiences, but in the end, unify the data and the technology.

John Furrier

>> So I've heard the term invisible T &E. What does that mean?

Oded Zehavi

>> Invisible T &E for me means that at the end of the day, the employee, which is one of our challenges as an office of the CFO platform, that you don't only need to deal with the CFOs that requires complexity. We also, most of our end users are employees that don't really think about technology. We are trying to embed what we do into their day -to -day operations. So they can go and book on whatever website they are used to, maybe on United website, or the corporate website, but we don't force them to change the way they operate. We are usually extracting the receipt information directly from their email or directly from the point of sale of the coffee shop that they just used. So we use the technology in order to make that process totally invisible to them. and in many cases they don't need to do anything. They just interact with our system. The system will create the memo for them, will tag the information based on the data we have, and they can focus on their business.

John Furrier

>> So invisible is a good thing.

Oded Zehavi

>> Invisible for me is the end game of how all processes should look like.

John Furrier

>> What's the biggest challenge CFOs have that you talk to? What's the biggest pain point? Biggest pain point.

Oded Zehavi

>> So I think the biggest pain point for companies now, they acknowledge that as opposed to historically when travel was relatively easy, meaning they could have signed with a travel agency and they would take care of them. Today, with the internet, employees usually have their own preferences, like their points, they have their own preferences, like the website.

John Furrier

>> They have the apps all downloaded.

Oded Zehavi

>> They have the apps and they can compare prices, they can decide to go on transportation methods that historically were not even considered to be part of the business day to day. So it becomes much more complex and it requires technology really to consolidate all of that in order to make the corporates still have full visibility and more importantly, control on the process.

John Furrier

>> Well you're like a consultant right here, giving them all the data. Alright, what about the best rewards program? I'm not kidding. Everyone wants to know that question. Rewards programs or rewards for employees. And I think a lot of people would look at, wait a minute, who gets the rewards, the company or the employees? Employees want it.

Oded Zehavi

>> Totally, and in my mind, the key is always flexibility, meaning it's up to the company to decide do they want to give the rewards to the employee, or they want to keep the cash back to themselves? They might want to mix and match between those two experiences, but at the end of the day, the key here is not to force the company to change the way they operate, just to help them do it better.

John Furrier

>> Talk about the momentum in your company. You were downstairs at the Jefferies conference going on here. A lot of investors. What's the data for them? Size, scope, momentum? What do they care about?

Oded Zehavi

>> So, we are really growing nicely. And for us, it was most important to become profitable, which is a key milestone for the company, which we just entered.

Oded Zehavi

>> Congratulations.

Oded Zehavi

>> And for us, that's the next big thing, is to really continue growing. As I mentioned, the market is still totally unserved. with all the competitors in the market, some of them are already public, and some of them are still private, we assume that all of us together, all the next generation platforms, are servicing less than 2 % of the market. So there is still 98 % of the market that use legacy banks, use traditional business travel platform. So the opportunity is still huge, and we were really focusing to adapt to the new norm, which is you need to have a sustainable business while continuing to grow and delivering more and more advanced technology.

John Furrier

>> You guys share your revenue numbers and customer numbers?

Oded Zehavi

>> We are a few tens of millions of dollars in revenue. More than 1 ,500 corporations use the platform and growing nicely.

John Furrier

>> no one likes to fill out expense reports, that's one, but the back office, you have that solution. So you're kind of doing both. You want to make it really easy for the user who's traveling gathering receipts taking pictures all kinds of artifacts laying around when I'm doing the travel it's like yeah and then that's real cash that's reimbursement for them and thecompany's

Oded Zehavi

>> totally and historically there was total decoupling between the expense platform and the software and the financial services and the banks I think the banks are still left behind because they couldn't adjust to the new technologies and on the other end, the software companies, especially the legacy ones, have not been investing during COVID, so many of them have disappeared. So now there is a new wave of companies and Mesh is one of the leading ones that can combine the financial aspects of the business and the technology to benefit the companies and employees.

John Furrier

>> Okay, thank you for coming on theCUBE and sharing with the NYSE Wired community, our brand. Thank you for sharing, appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Okay, the business transformation edge, its competitive edge. Streamlining operations check, user experience improves, everyone's happier. Again, AI is making it easier. We're going to continue to report on this as the transition to AI happens. Companies win in transition. And this is the transformation edge. Thanks for watching.

Oded Zehavi, Mesh

search

(INTRO)

John Furrier

>> John Furrier, host of theCUBE, here in the NYSE theCUBE studios. Of course, we have our Palo Alto studio connecting Silicon Valley to Wall Street. This is our Business Transformation Series, where we talk to the leaders who are making it happen and bringing the AI era to business. As business models transform, you got to measure it, you got to understand the operations, you got to tie it all together, you got to have agents running around. Of course, our leaders here are going to unpack that. Oded Zehavi here, CEO and co -founder of Mesh, a company doing a lot of work in the T &E platform area. Again, in finance, that's one thing, but also more broadly that hits everyone, great to see you, thanks for coming in.

John Furrier

>> Thank you for having me.

John Furrier

>> All right, explain what Mesh does and we'll get into it.

Oded Zehavi

>> So Mesh's vision is to make T &E invisible. the T &E space has been disrupted post -COVID. A lot of things have changed. Business travel is totally back, but people need to leverage AI to make T &E as automated as possible. People are tired of getting all these receipts, coming back from their business trip, and start filling out all these complicated forms.

John Furrier

>> Take a picture, explain everything.

Oded Zehavi

>> So again, the combination of the advancements in expense management, in business travel and AI and the FinTech space that we've started with the payment side, that's what creates the magic and Mesh is one of the players in that space.

John Furrier

>> So you guys started out as a payment company, right? In 2019?

John Furrier

>> Correct.

John Furrier

>> And then how did you get into the T&E? What was the journey?

Oded Zehavi

>> So COVID really changed the expense space in a way that before COVID it was all about T&E and during COVID, T&E was eliminated overnight. So a lot of the challenges that companies have faced then was companies become remote and global, and they need to pay for SaaS services, and they needed what we call next-generation corporate cards. And we were one of the players that built those platforms that really disrupted the traditional corporate cards that are still common, like the bank cards, but we have been building a platform that allows the companies all the flexibility, the control, the visibility in real time of spend. We were fortunate that we have been partnering with one of the biggest financial institutions in the U.S., which is SoFi, which is our sponsor. And we service hundreds of thousands of corporations and gave them what they need in order to fulfill the payment.

John Furrier

>> So you saw an opportunity and you went after it. SoFi was in the market. They were a partner.

Oded Zehavi

>> Yes.

John Furrier

>> And that enabled you to do what you do.

Oded Zehavi

>> Correct. Correct. And now fast forwarding, T &E is back, and T &E has become a very dominant, almost 20 % of the company's budget is now on T &E, and we've shifted a lot of the technology from doing something that is relatively generic to something that's really helped the company on a contextual basis and help them fulfill their mission.

John Furrier

>> Oded, the SoFi of the world, you got SoFi, you got Robinhood, So these are brands that cater to the younger generation. They wanted better user experience, . How much was that a factor in what you did? Or was it more the workflows? What was the key?

Oded Zehavi

>> I think the key for companies is first and foremost the workflows. Again, they look for the technology, they look for the automation, they look for the saving of time and money. Then the fact that you are coming with a strong financial infrastructure that people can relate to, that's really a bonus but at the end of the day if we look back 20 years ago nobody would have thought that they will not get their card from J.P. Morgan and today more people will prefer to get this from the next generation platform and not from a traditional legacy commercial bank so take me through the process the old corporate cards what's the new model take me through say I wanted to do

John Furrier

>> this I'm a customer potential customer I got about 200 employees they're all traveling around, what would I do? What's the product?

Oded Zehavi

>> So, a typical onboarding on the Mesh platform includes first and foremost connecting the Mesh platform to your entire financial back office. So we will connect in real time to your ERP, we'll connect in real time to your HR system, we'll connect in real time to the travel agency or the way you book your flights, and then we'll orchestrate all of that in real time. So now, from the minute you start operating, every employee is eligible to get a card, but he can also expense with his own personal card or with the traditional corporate card.

John Furrier

>> Can I get points on travel?

Oded Zehavi

>> You can leave your, some of what we've seen, one of the advantages of Mesh compared to some of the competitors in the market is that we are not forcing you to replace all your cards with Mesh cards, we are telling you, you can leave some of your executives that are addicted to their existing Amex card or JPMorgan card to feed those cards into our platform while some of the newer people might want a more controlled card with more visibility, which we offer. So it's really about leaving you the flexibility but making everything in real time. And now this infrastructure allows you to connect all your AI systems and leverage our AI technology in order to save you time and money.

John Furrier

>> All right, question, what's the floor, the minimum size customer and systems that have to be in place for them to be a customer?

Oded Zehavi

>> So we usually say that the complexity starts in an organization when you go above 10 employees. And it's really, I think the next milestone is 50 employees. We are mostly focused, even though we have a lot of SMBs as our customers, of course, our main focus is on the mid -market and above.

John Furrier

>> So you can serve that company that's growing out of QuickBooks into another system.

Oded Zehavi

>> Totally. We work with QuickBooks, with SAP, we work with NetSuite, which is the largest player in the mid -market. for us, and a lot of our customers, by the way, might have multiple ERPs and multiple HR systems if they are in multiple jurisdictions. So the market is still totally underserved.

John Furrier

>> Geography's a huge issue.

Oded Zehavi

>> Totally, totally. It's so different going back to travel, the way people in the US travel, and especially people in Europe travel, and I'm not even talking about India. So you need a platform that can adjust to all these different experiences, but in the end, unify the data and the technology.

John Furrier

>> So I've heard the term invisible T &E. What does that mean?

Oded Zehavi

>> Invisible T &E for me means that at the end of the day, the employee, which is one of our challenges as an office of the CFO platform, that you don't only need to deal with the CFOs that requires complexity. We also, most of our end users are employees that don't really think about technology. We are trying to embed what we do into their day -to -day operations. So they can go and book on whatever website they are used to, maybe on United website, or the corporate website, but we don't force them to change the way they operate. We are usually extracting the receipt information directly from their email or directly from the point of sale of the coffee shop that they just used. So we use the technology in order to make that process totally invisible to them. and in many cases they don't need to do anything. They just interact with our system. The system will create the memo for them, will tag the information based on the data we have, and they can focus on their business.

John Furrier

>> So invisible is a good thing.

Oded Zehavi

>> Invisible for me is the end game of how all processes should look like.

John Furrier

>> What's the biggest challenge CFOs have that you talk to? What's the biggest pain point? Biggest pain point.

Oded Zehavi

>> So I think the biggest pain point for companies now, they acknowledge that as opposed to historically when travel was relatively easy, meaning they could have signed with a travel agency and they would take care of them. Today, with the internet, employees usually have their own preferences, like their points, they have their own preferences, like the website.

John Furrier

>> They have the apps all downloaded.

Oded Zehavi

>> They have the apps and they can compare prices, they can decide to go on transportation methods that historically were not even considered to be part of the business day to day. So it becomes much more complex and it requires technology really to consolidate all of that in order to make the corporates still have full visibility and more importantly, control on the process.

John Furrier

>> Well you're like a consultant right here, giving them all the data. Alright, what about the best rewards program? I'm not kidding. Everyone wants to know that question. Rewards programs or rewards for employees. And I think a lot of people would look at, wait a minute, who gets the rewards, the company or the employees? Employees want it.

Oded Zehavi

>> Totally, and in my mind, the key is always flexibility, meaning it's up to the company to decide do they want to give the rewards to the employee, or they want to keep the cash back to themselves? They might want to mix and match between those two experiences, but at the end of the day, the key here is not to force the company to change the way they operate, just to help them do it better.

John Furrier

>> Talk about the momentum in your company. You were downstairs at the Jefferies conference going on here. A lot of investors. What's the data for them? Size, scope, momentum? What do they care about?

Oded Zehavi

>> So, we are really growing nicely. And for us, it was most important to become profitable, which is a key milestone for the company, which we just entered.

Oded Zehavi

>> Congratulations.

Oded Zehavi

>> And for us, that's the next big thing, is to really continue growing. As I mentioned, the market is still totally unserved. with all the competitors in the market, some of them are already public, and some of them are still private, we assume that all of us together, all the next generation platforms, are servicing less than 2 % of the market. So there is still 98 % of the market that use legacy banks, use traditional business travel platform. So the opportunity is still huge, and we were really focusing to adapt to the new norm, which is you need to have a sustainable business while continuing to grow and delivering more and more advanced technology.

John Furrier

>> You guys share your revenue numbers and customer numbers?

Oded Zehavi

>> We are a few tens of millions of dollars in revenue. More than 1 ,500 corporations use the platform and growing nicely.

John Furrier

>> no one likes to fill out expense reports, that's one, but the back office, you have that solution. So you're kind of doing both. You want to make it really easy for the user who's traveling gathering receipts taking pictures all kinds of artifacts laying around when I'm doing the travel it's like yeah and then that's real cash that's reimbursement for them and thecompany's

Oded Zehavi

>> totally and historically there was total decoupling between the expense platform and the software and the financial services and the banks I think the banks are still left behind because they couldn't adjust to the new technologies and on the other end, the software companies, especially the legacy ones, have not been investing during COVID, so many of them have disappeared. So now there is a new wave of companies and Mesh is one of the leading ones that can combine the financial aspects of the business and the technology to benefit the companies and employees.

John Furrier

>> Okay, thank you for coming on theCUBE and sharing with the NYSE Wired community, our brand. Thank you for sharing, appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Okay, the business transformation edge, its competitive edge. Streamlining operations check, user experience improves, everyone's happier. Again, AI is making it easier. We're going to continue to report on this as the transition to AI happens. Companies win in transition. And this is the transformation edge. Thanks for watching.