This Entrepreneur Raised $70M To Build An AI-Powered B2B2B Spend And Expense Management Platform

Andrew Jamison, co-founder and CEO of Extend, chose an entrepreneurial path that didn’t involve a bold dive. Instead, he spent years quietly learning, observing, and accumulating enough pattern recognition to know when it’s finally time to build.

Extend has raised more than $70M, built deep network-level trust with card issuers, and carved out one of the most compelling B2B2B positions in fintech. In a riveting interview, Andrew shares the lessons he learned while building within one of the most complex ecosystems in financial services.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

From Nowhere and Everywhere: Growing Up Across Cultures

Andrew grew up as a global citizen before the term existed. He was born in the UK to a Swedish mother and an Australian father, educated in the French school system, then later, at an English boarding school. That experience didn’t make life easier as a kid.

Andrew never quite fit in anywhere. In France, he wasn’t French. In England, he spoke with a French accent. Even in Australia, where his father was from, he was seen as “very English.” Yet what had felt like an Achilles’ heel in childhood became one of his greatest assets as an adult.

“Understanding cultures, listening deeply, understanding where people are coming from, and seeing how they react to things—that’s everything in business,” Andrew says. “It builds trust and drives engagement with people. And trust is the currency startups run on.”

Traveling during his youth reinforced this. With little money, Andrew worked a wide range of jobs, from packing boxes to sheep farming, engaging with different elements of society right across the board. He ended up going to Australia because his father is Australian.

Andrew worked alongside people who had never been more than four hours from home, yet shared long conversations with him, someone who had come from the other side of the world.

Those experiences became foundational. They taught Andrew how to relate, adapt, and build trust across wildly different environments. These skills would later prove invaluable in early-stage fundraising, enterprise partnerships, and building credibility with global card networks.

The First Career: Consulting and the “Entrepreneurship of the Mind”

Andrew attended Bath University and began his career not as a founder, but in consulting, specifically in a fast-growing firm that expanded from 50 to 700 people in five years. He chose the startup in the Systems, Applications & Products in Data Processing space above three strategic consultancies.

The experience was formative. While many consultants focus on frameworks, Andrew learned something very different: coding, systems logic, and accounting, a core functional skill he picked up because of his focus on finance.

That grounding in technical thinking, along with the breadth of exposure, gave Andrew the capabilities he would later rely on as a founder. “Consulting teaches you to stay one step ahead of the client; it’s entrepreneurship of the mind,” he says.

You learn to break down big problems, challenge assumptions, and think creatively without the practical experience of having been inside the company. But you don’t get to execute. And over time, Andrew realized he wanted both.

But he was also aware that he was offering ideas to clients who clearly knew more than he did. So after Druid, rather than launching a startup like many classmates, Andrew returned to school.

At 27, Andrew found himself seated before one of Polaroid’s boards, discussing how they should view their systems from a financial perspective.

Andrew also discussed the overall structure for rolling up information, outlining how to provide flexibility while still gaining key insights into the company’s internal operations. His stint at Druid had taught him the ability to straddle different operational aspects.

The Corporate Chapter: 12 Years at American Express

Andrew went on to earn his MBA at INSEAD and, instead of launching his own business, moved to Amex, a decision that was both strategic and personal. Professionally, he wanted to understand what it was like to sit behind a truly global brand, something he never experienced in small consulting.

The consultancy had, undoubtedly, grown quickly and had gone public, but it wasn’t a real brand. Andrew wanted to experience the instant credibility people with brands could get when they walked into a room.

Personally, Andrew had grown up watching his entrepreneurial father navigate nonstop intensity and uncertainty. His father had gone through three to four different companies. He was into shop-fitting equipment at massive hypermarkets in France, from shelving to digital labels used for pricing.

By contrast, Andrew saw the stability his uncle enjoyed as an executive in Switzerland’s farming sector. Amex wasn’t a retreat for Andrew; it was a training ground. He learned structure, operational excellence, culture, and how to execute within a massive global machine.

Andrew moved deeply into product and B2B, becoming part of the executive leadership program. But as Amex underwent leadership transitions and internal pressure grew for him to move from B2B into consumer roles he didn’t want, something shifted.

Andrew had the opportunity to learn different aspects of the business, but around this time, his mother fell seriously ill for the fourth time. Her illness forced him to confront the finiteness of time and the need for a sabbatical. That sabbatical changed everything.

The Breakthrough During a Time-Out: Realizing He Still Loved Building

Stepping away from corporate life gave Andrew the rarest resource founders often lack: uninterrupted time to think. “When you work for a large company, a million people tell you what you’re good at or what you should do next,” he recalls. “This was the first time I could ask: What do I actually like doing?”

The answer was simple: Andrew loved product, solving problems, and simplifying complexity and challenges. When he revisited issues inside the B2B payments ecosystem, a glaring opportunity emerged. The challenge of making technology accessible to different customer segments.

Andrew realized that virtual cards existed, but legacy systems had prevented them from reaching the companies and employees who needed them most. Ultimately, everyone used credit cards, from consumers in households to large global organizations.

Andrew recognized a significant travel opportunity by giving employees the option to spend company funds rather than use their cards and then be reimbursed. This insight became the seed for Extend.

The Birth of Extend: A Platform Layer, Not Another Issuer

Extend officially began in 2017. It addressed a significant problem in B2B spend: how to tackle the tail end of suppliers. And how to handle the massive emerging trend of subscriptions, where employees were signing up without a proper payment mechanism.

Freelancers and contractors couldn’t get corporate cards. And companies relied on reimbursements and manual processes for spend that should have been automated. In contrast, today 68% of Extend’s expenses are charged to cards, including software, web hosting, and distributed workflows.

Its processes mirror the broader trend of B2B payments shifting to virtual cards. As Andrew explains, Jira and ticket tracking are billed to his card and shared with the entire team.

The Extend Business Model

Extend caters to the small and medium-sized businesses (SMB) segment with spending and expense management tools suitable for companies with fewer than 1000 employees and less than $100M in revenue. The platform makes these tools easily accessible to their teams.

Instead of becoming a new issuer (like Ramp or Brex), Extend took a more complex but strategically powerful route. It facilitated the lives of startups with capital but no credit history who needed credit card products.

Andrew asked: Why should companies have to switch banks or card issuers just to get modern spend and expense management tools? Why can’t we overlay technology onto the existing legacy stack and enable those same software workflows that help businesses become more efficient?

Extend would enable:

• Digital cards with upfront controls
• Automated limits, merchant restrictions, and time windows
• Seamless workflows for SaaS and distributed teams
• Expense management on digital or physical cards that reduces friction for users, approvers, and finance teams

The Fundraising Journey: From Friends & Family to $70M+

For someone who had spent his corporate life pitching for budgets, fundraising as a founder was a shock. “The most mind-boggling part was realizing I had no idea how to raise capital,” Andrew says.

The Failed First Pitch (and the Lesson)

One of the earliest attempts involved an investor who asked Andrew to rewrite his entire narrative the night before the meeting. He complied, but the next morning, their train was delayed by two hours, and they arrived five minutes late.

Instead of the three people Andrew anticipated, 16 investors comprising the entire executive team were in the room, and the new story felt completely unnatural. “It was a train coming off the tracks,” he recalls. He learned valuable lessons from the experience.

Always arrive a day early for meetings, and, most importantly, never let anyone else tell your story. Your narrative must come from conviction and authenticity, not from a last-minute rewrite for someone else’s preference. Accept only good feedback and incorporate it as needed.

Storytelling is everything that Andrew was able to master. The key is capturing the essence of what you are doing in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, take a look at the pitch deck template created by Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley legend (see it here), where the most critical slides are highlighted.

Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

The Friends & Family Requirement

Before any VC would invest, they wanted social proof. Coming from corporate, Andrew had no entrepreneurial background, so investors pushed him to raise $250K from friends and industry peers first. Ten people wrote $25K checks.

That capital enabled Extend to build an MVP that could actually make a purchase with a virtual card, something they demonstrated by the time they met Steve Cohen and the team at Point72 Ventures. The virtual card enabled users to make a purchase with just a card number on their phone.

The Real Breakthrough

A breakfast with Cohen turned into a 90-minute deep dive with his extended executive team. They explored Extend’s data, infrastructure, and roadmap. Three months later, Extend received its first multimillion-dollar institutional check. Eventually, the company raised over $70M in funding.

Trust and Investor Relationships Through Market Cycles

Andrew believes great investor relationships reveal themselves when the tide goes out. “In good times, everyone’s a hero. In downturns, you see people’s real personalities.”

Trust, transparency, and clean communication are essential. Investors only spend two or three days per quarter thinking deeply about your company, so founders must package information clearly, highlight the good and the ugly, and avoid storytelling that will eventually collapse under scrutiny.

“If you’ve been honest, your investors will have your back,” Andrew says. “If you’ve been dressing things up, that’s when things fall apart.”

The Future of Extend: Where Payments, Software, and AI Converge

Andrew reveals his vision for Extend that goes beyond an IPO or an acquisition. As he reveals, Extend is a B2B2B company and sits at the intersection of major shifts.

Andrew recognizes the potential of credit card networks, certain issuers, and processors that still operate around green screens, as they haven’t yet moved to the cloud. He recognizes that software platforms are moving deeper into payments and accounting, necessitating embedded spend & expense management.

As Andrew points out, some of the accounting solutions out there will need spend and expense management, because the general ledger alone won’t be enough over time as others enter that space. Building trust with card networks means building trust with issuers.

Andrew sees a world where AI agents will attempt purchases, but liability models between merchants and issuers must evolve. Extend may play a critical role by becoming the intermediary that confirms intent, issues a short-lived digital card, and maintains the trust layer banks require.

Extend’s partnerships across networks and issuers, plus its B2B2B positioning, may prove strategically decisive as these worlds blend.

Advice to His Younger Self: Focus, Trust, and Verification

Andrew’s core advice to founders is simple but hard-earned: “Be really freaking focused.” Early-stage resources are scarce. The temptation to go broad is deadly. Build trust with partners and employees, but verify it.

Balance commitments, shape contracts carefully, and avoid taking all the risk when others aren’t matching it. Above all, Andrew remains deeply curious. It’s one of Extend’s core values and one he embraced long before starting the company.

Andrew loves meeting people, learning, and helping others navigate the complexities of the financial and software ecosystems. “No one builds it perfectly on the first try,” he says. “If someone needs advice on how these strategic and financial worlds fit together, I’m always happy to help.”

In Conclusion

Andrew Jamison’s path to entrepreneurship has been anything but linear. His journey spans an international childhood, multiple cultural identities, years in a fast-growing consulting firm, 12 years at American Express, a sabbatical that changed everything, and then a crash course in fundraising during the earliest chapters of Extend.

Today, Extend is one of the most respected spend and expense management platforms in the U.S. It is powering the long-overdue modernization of virtual cards, automating compliance, and helping SMBs bring financial discipline to day-to-day spend.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Growing up across cultures taught Andrew to read people, build trust quickly, and turn early identity confusion into a lifelong business advantage.
• Consulting gave him “entrepreneurship of the mind,” combining problem-structuring with deep technical and accounting skills that later powered his product thinking.
• Twelve years at American Express refined his execution muscle and B2B product instincts, while also showing him when big-company paths no longer fit his strengths.
• A sabbatical, triggered by his mother’s illness, gave Andrew the space to rediscover his love of building products, simplifying complexity, and solving real B2B pain points.
• Extend was born from a simple insight: instead of forcing companies to change banks, overlay modern virtual card and spend tools onto existing issuer infrastructure for SMBs.
• Andrew’s fundraising journey—from friends-and-family capital to $70M+—taught him never to let investors rewrite his story and to prove trust with a real, working MVP.
• Andrew’s core advice to founders is to be “really freaking focused,” build trust but always verify, and remember that the quality of your investor relationships is revealed when the cycle turns.

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Keep in mind that storytelling is everything in fundraising. In this regard, for a winning pitch deck to help you, take a look at the template created by Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley legend (see it here), which I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash. 

Remember to unlock for free the pitch deck template that founders worldwide are using to raise millions below.

 

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