Philippe Sahli and Devis Lussi founded Yokoy in Zurich in 2019 — originally as Expense Robot — entering a spend management market that was already crowded with well-funded competitors. Their differentiation was to push automation further than anyone else: an AI-driven platform for expenses, supplier invoices and corporate card payments aimed at what the company called zero-touch spend management, where routine transactions are processed, matched and posted without human intervention at all.
It worked well enough to attract more than 700 corporate customers and $108 million in funding from investors including Sequoia Capital and Speedinvest, and to place Yokoy on the podium of the TOP 100 Swiss Startup Awards three years running. Customers included Breitling, On Running and Medskin — mid-market and enterprise European companies with genuine finance-department complexity rather than startups needing a card.
In January 2025, Yokoy was acquired by TravelPerk, the Barcelona-based business travel platform, in an all-equity deal announced alongside a $200 million Series E that valued the combined company at $2.7 billion. The logic was straightforward: TravelPerk had partnered with Yokoy since 2020 and the two products solve adjacent halves of the same problem, since business travel is where most corporate expenses originate. Sahli and Lussi joined TravelPerk with the team, and Yokoy's AI development continues from Zurich.
For anyone assessing Yokoy today, the honest framing is that it is no longer an independent Swiss company. It is the expense and spend management layer of an integrated travel and expense platform, and its roadmap is set by a parent whose primary business is travel booking. The technology and the Zurich engineering base persist; the strategic autonomy does not. It is also a data point in a pattern this directory keeps recording — European fintechs with strong technology and real customers being absorbed by larger platforms rather than reaching independent scale.