Expense reporting startup Captio has 80,000 reasons to believe you can build a big business selling only to Spain
Summary
“A decade ago I started a technology consulting firm in Tarragona, and I quickly saw that tracking expenses, invoices and other forms bureaucracy was a waste of time”, he recently told me in a phone conversation. Those were the origins of Captio, a Catalan startup co-founded by Vicient, Joaquin Segura, Lluís Claramonte and Dan Moser, that has grown significantly over the past few years thanks to the OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology built in-house. At the time, smartphones were increasingly becoming a force in the world of technology and apps were starting to be a thing, which pushed the company to transform its product and focus exclusively on mobile phones. The startup establishes a direct connection with their client’s finance departments to update their expense tracking software in real-time and with the official Spanish tax agency, thus avoiding tickets being lost, administrative mistakes and fraud. Vicient admits that they’ve been growing at rates of more than 300% over the past few years on various fronts (revenue, tickets scanned, active users) and that more than 40,000 people use the app on a monthly basis.