Company: Pleo
CEO and Co-Founder: Jeppe Rindom
Website: https://www.pleo.io/en/lp/n-home
About Pleo
Pleo launched in 2015 with a simple ambition of bringing spend management into the 21st century, finally giving finance leaders the complete control, confidence and clarity they deserve. It was built for CFOs by a CFO, shaped by a peer-level understanding of what finance teams were battling day-to-day.
Expense reporting was still a messy paper trail. Employees were fronting cash, losing receipts and chasing reimbursements. While finance teams were stuck with fragmented tools, manual data entry and reconciliations, adding up to hours and days wasted on admin and hindsight reporting. This gap was the single biggest constraint in business growth/acceleration.
Cue Pleo. We jumped in to set a new standard for spend management in Europe.
We launched with a conviction like no other: give people smart company cards, real-time visibility, and the right policies, and you don’t need to police spend. You make it work by design. From day one, we believed that finance should enable, not obstruct, and that employee autonomy can coexist with strong guardrails.
Our biggest early challenge wasn’t only building the product, it was changing behaviour. Decades of habit had made expense reports feel inevitable. Pleo had to make the alternative feel obvious: a system that is faster for employees and more reliable for finance, without compromising oversight.
Pleo created a new category in European fintech. Real-time spend management built on visibility by default, trust within guardrails, and data that syncs to accounting automatically. That influence reshaped expectations across the SME finance stack. Established players, including banks and accounting software providers, have moved to match capabilities that Pleo pioneered. Most significantly, Pleo proved that trust-based financial tooling works. By giving employees autonomy within guardrails doesn’t increase risk, it reduces it.
Today, finance leaders are expected to be strategic partners — yet they’re still operating in the dark, with disconnected tools, manual workflows and limited oversight. The role has evolved. The systems haven’t.
With economic uncertainty and rising costs adding fresh pressure, finance teams need more than expense management. They need complete control. That’s why we’ve continued to build, creating a platform that gives finance teams total visibility of company spend, inside and outside of Pleo, with one simple way to track, manage and optimise it. The companies winning right now aren’t just monitoring spend; they’re attributing it to purpose, forecasting with confidence, and connecting financial data to commercial outcomes.
The next step in Pleo’s evolution takes that further. Pleo Embedded allows businesses managing large networks of SMB customers to offer real-time spend and cash management capabilities directly from their own platform, fully white-labelled or co-branded, and live in a matter of weeks.
We’re building a future where technology doesn’t just track spend; it helps businesses shape what’s next. A future that’s more connected. More strategic. More decisive.
That future was always the plan. Because Pleo was built for CFOs, by a CFO, and shaped from day one by someone who knew exactly what finance teams were up against every day and every month-end.
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