Expensify Revenue: Under $100M ARR in 2017, in David Barrett’s Words, and the SEC Filings Since

Expensify’s most recent annual report puts its revenue at $142.1 million for 2025, up about 2% from $139.2 million in 2024, according to the 10-K the company filed with the SEC on February 26, 2026. When founder David Barrett talked to Nathan Latka in December 2017, Expensify was private, and Barrett gave one revenue figure: a ceiling. Nathan offered a bracket, “somewhere between the, call it, 60 and a $100,000,000 ARR range”, and Barrett answered: “Yeah. We’re still under a 100. That’s right.”

That is the whole revenue disclosure on the recording. The “$60m+” in the episode’s YouTube title is the bottom of Nathan’s bracket, not a number Barrett said, and a few minutes later Nathan described the company as “going from 50,000,000, trying to get to a 100,000,000”, a different floor of his own. Asked whether Expensify would pass $100 million in 2018, Barrett said: “It’s probably not 2018.” The later filings report revenue rather than ARR, but they fit his forecast: the first year they cover, 2019, came in at $80.5 million, and annual revenue first went past $100 million in 2021.

Expensify revenue in the December 2017 interview

The conversation was recorded over Skype in December 2017. Nathan dates it in his closing recap (“between last year and today, December 2017”), and the episode was published on December 12, 2017. Barrett was a returning guest, and several of the numbers Nathan brought to the call came from his earlier appearances. Nearly every revenue and growth figure on the tape is Nathan’s. Here is each one, with Barrett’s reply:

Times are minutes and seconds into the recording.

So the growth rate is not on the record. The direction is. Barrett said “this year, especially, has been crazy”, and he tied a pickup in revenue to a turn away from big customers: “we’ve been reorienting the company around sort of mid market companies in SMB. And as we do that, we are actually seeing our revenue reaccelerate, which has been great.” He put an earlier slowdown down to a couple of years spent distracted by the enterprise, after starting out with smaller companies.

“Enterprise sucks, man. It’s just like, it’s super slow sales cycles, and the margins are terrible, and super competitive, it’s whatever. The real opportunity is mid market and below.”

Customers and team, as Barrett counted them

The customer figure is Barrett’s own. Nathan asked how many seats were in use; Barrett said he did not know that number and offered a company count instead, about 45,000 paying companies. Asked to repeat it, he said: “About 45,000.” Nathan recalled 42,000 from Barrett’s appearance four months earlier, a figure Barrett did not restate. Barrett also said Expensify had more companies than the next four expense-reporting vendors, without naming them or saying whether he meant each one or all four together.

On headcount, Nathan had the company at 120 people about three months earlier. Barrett corrected it: “It’s more like maybe a 110 right now.” He added that he had probably given Nathan “the bad number before.”

How Expensify sold: no commissions, no ads running, not no-touch

The product, as Barrett described it, was simple: “It’s a mobile app for business travelers. You take a picture of your receipts.” Expensify read the receipt, submitted the report and got the employee “paid the very next day for the Starbucks purchase you made today.” The sales model was the unusual part. Barrett said the company set itself apart by “acquiring the individual first”, and he agreed with Nathan’s picture of one employee spreading the app through an office until the company bought a seat package: “That’s exactly right. And that’s that’s our whole business model.”

• No advertising at the time. “We have no advertising going on whatsoever right now. It’s all a 100% word-of-mouth.” It had been tried. Asked about the big swings he said Expensify had taken with its funding and missed, his first example was: “I would say like advertising.”
• No commissions. “There’s no commission sales component at Expensify. So no one’s paid a commission at all.”
• Not no-touch. “It’s certainly not no touch.” Pricing was activity based (“That means we only get paid when you get active”), so the company kept “a whole team standing by that will help you get on board.”
• Cheap on purpose. “We’ve always tried to keep ourselves the least expensive option in the market.” Growth was to come from more customers: “I’m much more focused on just massive scale than I am on trying to squeeze harder.”

The episode contains two per-user prices, $9 and $8 a month, and both are Nathan’s. The $9 was his recollection of an earlier show (“you said they go up to an average ARPU of about $9 a pop”). Barrett’s “Yeah. That’s right.” ran straight into his point about acquiring the individual first, and he never named a price himself. The “about $8 a month” comes from Nathan’s closing recap. The two do not agree, and neither is a figure Barrett gave.

A product that started as a cover story

Barrett said he never meant to build expense software. “I was doing something just completely different in the prepaid debit card space. And the banks just had no interest in me.” He needed something low-risk to win them over: “I’m like, what is the most boring thing I can think of? I’m like, expense reports.” It was, he said, “a fake product that I was just making up as I went along”, until people told him “your prepaid debit cards are cool and all, but your expense reports are amazing.” Expensify’s own history page tells the same story: in 2008 Barrett presented the card concept at TechCrunch50, reframed as an expense management system, “with no plans of actually building it.”

About $27 million raised, and a founder who regretted the dilution

Nathan twice put Expensify’s funding at $25 million. Barrett corrected him: “Like 27, I think it is.” Nothing new had been raised since his previous appearance: “We’re profitable. So we just, we’re off that whole bandwagon.” The private rounds reported in the press fit his number. Reuters reported $1 million of seed money in May 2009 and a $5.7 million second round led by Redpoint Ventures in September 2010. TechCrunch reported $3.5 million in September 2014, which it said brought the total to “just over $10 million”, and described the company as “already profitable” at the time. Global Venturing reported a $17.5 million Series C led by OpenView Venture Partners in July 2015. Together that is about $27.7 million.

Some tallies of Expensify’s private funding run to $38 million or more. They count an $11 million loan from the bank CIBC that Expensify borrowed in May 2018, five months after this interview. The company’s 10-Q for the quarter ended September 30, 2021 lists it as an interest-only term loan at a fixed 9.5%, due in November 2023: debt, not a funding round.

Asked whether he regretted raising at all, Barrett was candid: “it’s easy to say yes because I regret the dilution, but on the other hand, I spent it all. So I clearly needed it.” He said the standard playbook (raise money, spend it on ads, hire a high-performance sales team) is not how the best companies were built: “all the top names in the industry are built through word-of-mouth. But no one talks about that because it’s not possible to be funded with capital.”

“… to celebrate raising money is to celebrate that you took out a loan.”

His answer to the closing question, what he would tell his 20-year-old self, was four words: “stop listening to VCs.”

Since the interview: Expensify revenue in its SEC filings

Everything in this section comes from after the recording. Expensify listed on Nasdaq under the ticker EXFY on November 10, 2021, according to the company’s history page, and has filed audited results since. The filings report revenue, not ARR, and the earliest year in their financial statements is 2019.

Full calendar years, as reported in Expensify’s 10-K filings to the SEC (revenue from contracts with customers; net income or loss).

Revenue first passed $100 million in 2021, a 62% jump on 2020, and peaked at $169.5 million in 2022. It fell in each of the next two years, and the 2025 figure of $142.1 million is about 16% below that peak. Profit is the measure that changed most. Barrett said “We’re profitable” in December 2017, and the filings show net income of $1.2 million in 2019; every year from 2020 through 2025 ended in a net loss, $21.4 million in 2025.

Some of the 2017 model is still in the filings. The 2025 10-K says: “Our viral and word-of-mouth lead generation enables us to employ a self-service and inbound sales model.” It counts 117 full-time employees at December 31, 2025, close to the roughly 110 Barrett described eight years earlier, and an average of 650,000 paid members across 39,700 companies in the fourth quarter of 2025. That company count is below the 45,000 paying companies Barrett gave in 2017, though a quarterly average defined in a filing is not necessarily the same measure as his estimate on the call. Barrett is Expensify’s chief executive today: he signed the CEO certification in its 10-Q for the second quarter of 2026, filed August 6, 2026.

Expensify’s current figures are on its GetLatka company profile, and the full December 2017 conversation, with its transcript, is on the interview page.