The Global Expense Management Software market is estimated to grow at 16% CAGR from $5.5 billion in 2020 to to $13.3 billion by 2026. San Mateo-based Coupa (Nasdaq: COUP) is building on its PaaS initiative to target this high growth market.

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Coupa’s Financials

Revenues for the third quarter grew 40% to $186 million, ahead of the market’s estimates of $162.98 million. GAAP net loss of $91.2 million was significantly lower than the previous year’s net loss of $60.8 million. Non GAAP net income was $0.31 per share, ahead of analyst estimates of $0.29 per share.

By segment, subscription services revenues increased 39.5% to $164.75 million and professional services revenues grew 41.6% to $21.07 million.

For the fourth quarter, the company expects revenues of $185-$186 million with non-GAAP net income of $0.03-$0.05 per share. It expects to end the year with revenues of $717-$718 million and net income of $0.66-$0.69 per share. The market was looking revenues of $185.87 million and an EPS of $0.01 for Q4 and revenues of $716.66 million and an EPS of $0.50 for the year.

Coupa’s Product Upgrades

Coupa realizes that there is a global trend of digital transformation of the back office. To address this growing demand, it has a strategy based on the three waves of capturing all spend, optimizing every dollar through a suite synergy, and then amplifying community value.

The first wave of capturing spend is centered on its transactional core. Coupa’s fully cloud-based scalable, user-intuitive core processes tens of millions of daily transactions and enables customers to drive meaningful adoption across the organization even when operating with siloed ERPs. The current pandemic has slowed global travel. But, as vaccinations increase and restrictions reduce, business travel is bound to rebound. Coupa is preparing for that return by creating a comprehensive end-to-end T&E solution, that includes a bookings engine, provides optimized pricing and has direct integration with Coupa Pay for reimbursements.

The second wave of its winning strategy focuses on optimizing its suite synergy. It is helping customers unlock value from the more than $3 trillion of spend cumulatively processed through its platform. Some use cases include a beauty and personal care manufacturer that is using Coupa’s supply chain design and planning to optimize their inventory, improve service to their customers and save money. The organization has improved their overall service levels while seeing a 25% reduction of total inventory, and 35% reduction of safety stock.

Finally, to amplify community value, Coupa is improving the analytics from the data it processes. Coupa has surpassed over $3 trillion in cumulative spend under management with $1 trillion being processed in the last year alone. It is providing prescriptive insights from its Community.AI initiative and helping customers see significant results. Customers are using its online community to conduct research and are trading insights on industry best practices within the community.

To further enhance its partner capabilities, last quarter, Coupa launched its app marketplace. It already has over 100 apps that are enabled or in the process of being enabled for its customers. These customers are able to leverage pre-built integrations to make their software more valuable to them. Coupa has also gained access to new functionalities, such as tax engines, supplier collaborations, ESG, and corporate responsibility through these apps. For instance, a tax integration built by Vertex supports tax calculation on invoice validation and provides significant capabilities by pairing tax automation with Coupa’s procurement transformation.

I would like to see Coupa publish more metrics about their PaaS ecosystem. By reporting on metrics such as app usage, revenues from marketplace, revenues earned by app makers by selling their apps, details on the growth of Coupa’s PaaS business, and the associated market opportunity, it will give analysts the ability to learn and appropriately value its PaaS business.

Coupa’s stock is trading at $155.49 with a market capitalization of $11.6 billion. The stock hit a 52-week high of $377.04 in February and a 52-week low of $154.26 earlier this month.