Airbase Strengthens Leadership Team with New VP of Business Development and VP of People to Support Continued Growth
The most comprehensive spend management platform strengthens leadership team with the appointment of two key hires from Coupa and Plenty.
Airbase, the leading spend management platform for companies from founding to IPO, announced the appointment of two new senior hires by adding Daniel DeVall from Coupa as VP of Business Development and Sarah Lovelace from Plenty as VP of People. The news comes on the heels of the company’s announcement of a $60M Series B Capital Raise, Led by Menlo Ventures.
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“Daniel and Sarah join our growing team at an important time – Thejo Kote Airbase Founder/CEO.”
At Coupa, Daniel was the Vice President of Sales of Coupa Pay. He joined the company in 2018 as an early leader in the new Coupa Pay division, where he was responsible for the first several hundred clients, and for developing strategic partnerships with some of the world’s largest banks and implementation partners. Before Coupa, Dan led business development and alliances at AP automation vendor Tipalti, building the foundation for their alliance’s program and working closely with sales to close some of their largest customers during his time there. Prior to his jump into software, Daniel spent 12 years as a technology banker at Wells Fargo based in Silicon Valley where he gained his experience in fintech and served as a trusted advisor to his customer base.
Sarah brings over a decade of human resources and people functions experience to Airbase. Previously, she was integral in architecting the People team at Plenty, a San Francisco-based indoor vertical farming company, as their first VP of People. She joined Plenty as the sixth employee and helped grow it to nearly 400 employees. The role included recruiting, people operations, people partners, learning and development, total rewards, and diversity and inclusion. Sarah also spent close to seven years at Box, the Cloud Content Management company, where she was responsible for building out the engineering team, launched and oversaw Box’s expansion to Austin, and the overall strategic direction of all talent acquisition-related programs.
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As it races to keep pace with its growth, Airbase has more than doubled its headcount in the last 12 months and employs a fully distributed team located across ten countries. This is in addition to the recent new hire of Aneal Vallurupalli as CFO, who last month the company announced had joined from Mattermost.
“Daniel and Sarah join our growing team at an important time,” said Airbase Founder and CEO Thejo Kote. “The truth is that there are only two true spend management companies in the market today — no others are even scratching the surface of solving the problem of how growing companies spend money with such depth and breadth. Mid-market and early enterprise companies have been forced to adopt Coupa, a primarily large enterprise focused solution. Airbase is offering a compelling alternative to these fast-growing companies with a solution tailored to their stage. We’re very happy to attract such strong talent from within their Coupa Pay division. The appointment of Daniel will help us build out a comprehensive partner ecosystem that will further improve the lives of finance teams.”
“Similarly, when I asked around as to the strongest people operations leaders, Sarah’s name consistently came up as the best. It’s always a challenge growing a company so fast, and continuing to put both employees and customers first, and I’m very happy that Sarah has chosen to help shape the journeys of each of our team members.”
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