AppZen Raises $180 Million Growth Round Led by Riverwood Capital to Take the Next Step in Autonomous Finance

New funding will support AppZen's innovative Mastermind AI Studio with AI Agents, and accelerate go-to-market growth globally 

SAN JOSE, Calif., Sept. 22, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- AppZen, the leading Agentic AI platform for finance teams, announced it raised $180 million in growth funding. This round was led by Riverwood Capital, one of the leading investment firms solely dedicated to technology growth and scalability. 

AppZen is the AI-native platform for autonomous finance. Powered by proprietary ZenLM models and the Mastermind AI Automation Platform, AppZen's domain-trained AI Agents streamline end-to-end workflows across T&E, accounts payable, and corporate card programs, transforming finance teams. More than 500 global enterprises, including over 65 of the Fortune 500, rely on AppZen to automate transaction processing and reduce costs, delivering over $2 billion in savings and enabling finance teams to reallocate up to two-thirds of their manual workload to higher-value activities.

The Series D fundraise allows AppZen to further accelerate the adoption of agentic AI at the enterprise, converting standard operating procedures into configurable, production-ready, digital coworkers, enabling CFOs and controllers to replace over 50% of manual work and scale operations without additional headcount or BPO.

"We're thrilled to welcome Riverwood Capital as a partner in our mission to bring agentic AI to every finance team," said Anant Kale, Co-founder & CEO at AppZen. "Riverwood's scale-up expertise and global network will help us accelerate the deployment of Mastermind AI Agents, so finance workflows can run on autopilot. With many of the world's largest companies already on AppZen, demand for autonomous finance has never been higher. Together with Riverwood Capital, we'll meet that customer need at scale and realize the full opportunity to reimagine how CFOs run finance."

Enterprises face mounting pressure to cut costs, fight fraud, and manage compliance across complex global operations. To solve this growing problem, they're adopting artificial intelligence at an accelerated rate. According to Fortune, the global AI market is projected to grow from over $290 billion in 2025 to $1.7 trillion by 2032. Gartner analysis further estimates that 33% of enterprise software applications will have embedded agentic AI by 2028. As part of these organizations, finance is poised for a major transformation from process automation to autonomous decision-making with agentic applications. AppZen is leading the way with agentic technology that helps finance teams eliminate manual review, reduce spend leakage, and ensure regulatory compliance.

"AppZen is at the forefront of a massive shift in how global enterprises leverage AI and automation to drive efficiency and scale their operations," said Francisco Alvarez-Demalde, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Riverwood Capital. "We are excited to partner with Anant and his exceptional team, whose vision and execution have made AppZen the category leader in autonomous finance for the enterprise and positioned the company to transform how businesses manage, audit, decide, and run expenses and payables." Francisco Alvarez-Demalde and Riverwood Capital Partner Alex Porto have joined AppZen's Board of Directors.

AppZen's models power deep semantic understanding across 40+ languages and 60+ countries. Its platform supports multi-entity and multi-currency operations, helping some of the world's most complex and highly regulated enterprises to cut fraud-related losses on an international level, while achieving major efficiency and cost savings.

"AppZen's impact at Airbus was immediate," said Waqas Aman, Head of Financial Systems North America, Airbus. "It significantly reduced the workload for our T&E analysts, allowing them to focus on more strategic activities. The platform helped us identify ambiguities in our T&E policies and eliminate inconsistent micro-policies throughout the company." 

The Mastermind AI Studio, the latest addition to AppZen's Mastermind AI Automation Platform, will allow teams to quickly modernize their standard operating procedures into AI Agents without coding, IT resources, or specialized training. By utilizing the new platform, customers can deploy AI Agents as digital workers, reducing headcount costs, speeding up processing times, and meeting demanding compliance needs.

J.P. Morgan acted as the sole placement agent to AppZen on the transaction.

About AppZen

AppZen is the leader in autonomous finance operations, providing enterprise-grade, agentic AI for finance teams at Fortune 500 corporations and global companies such as Amazon, Boeing, Salesforce, Novartis, and JPMorgan Chase. AppZen's customers rely on its finance AI to help transform their finance processing of T&E, corporate card, and accounts payable transactions into autonomous finance operations. AppZen processes millions of transactions globally, delivering unprecedented efficiency, accuracy, and compliance for its customers. For more: visit www.appzen.com

About Riverwood Capital

Riverwood Capital invests in high-growth companies in the technology and technology-enabled industries. Riverwood offers a unique combination of operational, strategic, technology, and financial insight to portfolio companies that typically need growth capital and expertise to scale on a global basis. The firm seeks to invest in established businesses with a proven technology and business model, and the proper fit in terms of culture and values. Riverwood was founded in 2008 and has had the opportunity to invest in and support over 85 companies since inception, which have grown revenues at ~35% per year on average during that period. The Firm has offices in Menlo Park, CA, Miami, FL, New York, NY, and São Paulo, Brazil. For more: visit www.riverwoodcapital.com

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References

www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/industry-reports/artificial-intelligence-market-100114 

SOURCE AppZen