ApprovalMax recently celebrated a huge milestone: securing £10M in growth investment to take the business to the next level. This represents tremendous progress and opens an exciting new chapter in the business’ story. So how did the team grow ApprovalMax to where it is today? We spoke to Konstantin Bredyuk, CEO of ApprovalMax, to learn more about the business’ history, growth, and plans for the future.

Where did the idea for ApprovalMax first come from?

These days, accounts payable and receivable automation is everywhere. Back when myself, Helmut and Peter founded the company, however, this wasn’t the case. In fact, only large organisations had access to the business process tools that could make these simpler, leaving small and medium sized businesses to rely on clunky manual approval processes.

We first met working as colleagues. Over lunch breaks and after work drinks, we would often sit around and talk about this pain we saw among CFOs first hand. It was always centred around the issue of account payable and accounts receivable automation. These talks would go on for a number of months until the three of us decided we couldn’t sit around and let it go on – it inspired us to start ApprovalMax, so we could go out and make a difference in the world.

The CFOs we were hearing from couldn’t afford enterprise-grade systems and had to rely on very basic tools such as Excel, Word, and email to organise approvals for their financial documents – systems that are not only slow but prone to error and even fraud.

One conversation I had with a very passionate CFO ended with him confiding how his team had made a huge slip up, by making a duplicate payment worth £300,000 that was not authorised. I can remember these long and awkward pauses as he spoke, and I was honestly wondering if he was going to keep the conversation going or not. That’s how I knew it was really difficult for him to open up and talk about it. That’s when we knew we had to roll out ApprovalMax ASAP. We wanted to provide an easy to use tool that anyone could use to collaborate and get simple approvals sorted, and to protect businesses of all sizes.

Once you had the idea, how did the business get up and running?

Initially, our first version of ApprovalMax just handled the basic bill approvals process, routing bills to approvers based on flexible criteria. This multi-step approval process and approval matrix very quickly proved to be what set us apart. When it came time to sell, we got our first customer within two days. We were so pumped and will always remember the very first deal we ever closed – we knew we were on to something.

We had a clear split of responsibilities where Peter was taking care of the technical part, I was leading the vision, and Helmut was taking care of the business matters. But as a bootstrapped business, we had to make all key decisions together. There wasn’t room for any extra expenses or errors!

As time went on, one closed deal turned into 10, then it reached 100… yes, you get it. The rest is history.

I’ve heard you even worked on ApprovalMax from the top of Mount Kilimanjaro – is that right?

While we all work well together professionally, we also clicked right away and share many of the same hobbies and interests. That’s how we ended up talking about ApprovalMax from the top of Mount Kilimanjaro, yachting in the Seychelles and diving in the Great Barrier Reef. It was useless to try not to talk about work – it naturally happened every time!

How has ApprovalMax grown since then?

Since then, we’ve added plenty more features across accounts payable and receivable, such as budget checking, bill-to-PO matching, and now ApprovalMax Capture and Pay, but they all link back to the same goal: making life easier for businesses of all sizes.

We’ve also expanded our team to bring the product to life and support more than 16,000 customers worldwide. Our bootstrapped origins allowed us to stay profitable and lean while still growing the business to where it is today.

What’s next?

We’re excited to take the next steps to keep growing ApprovalMax and helping our customers well into the future – who knows, maybe we’ll be planning on Mount Everest next.