Ledge aims to build automation tools for finance teams

The rapid adoption of digital payments has become a great challenge for finance teams. According to one report, teams spend as much as 40% of their time processing transactions. To blame is disparate, unstructured data, they say. In a separate survey, 48% of teams peg fragmented data as the largest impediment to closing their books.

Tal Kirschenbaum is well acquainted with the struggle. He worked a Melio, a business-to-business (B2B) payments platform for small companies, where he saw finance teams become the victims of their own success.

“Some companies have payments expertise and are able to invest R&D resources into building great internal solutions to handle the problem, but that’s not a feasible option for most businesses,” Kirschenbaum told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Finance teams are forced to work as ‘human glue’ to hold together a complex payments stack of payment processors, banks, enterprise resource management platforms, databases and more.”

That led Kirschenbaum to co-found a fintech startup, Ledge, with Asaf Kotzer and Ariel Weiss in 2022….