Dive Brief:
- Spend management company Coupa has tapped Michael Agresta, most recently CFO of online education company Pluralsight and a veteran of event management and ticketing company Eventbrite, as its new CFO, according to a Tuesday press release.
- The appointment comes comes on the heels of the San Mateo, California-based company’s acquisition last year by private equity firm Thoma Bravo in an $8 billion take-private deal, and a C-suite shake-up with CEO Leagh Turner taking the CEO post and tech industry veteran Kevin Burns taking the finance reins, CFO Dive previously reported. Burns’s tenure at Coupa ended in July, according to his LinkedIn profile. Alicia Allen, now Coupa’s SVP, chief accounting and financial operations officer, stepped in to act as interim CFO prior to Agresta’s appointment, according to a company spokesperson.
- Turner, in a statement in the release, said Agresta’s experience improving go-to-market operations will speed Coupa’s growth. “Coupa’s journey to becoming a $2 billion industry leader and beyond requires our global team to grow with leaders who are dedicated to transformation, innovation, and customer success. Michael Agresta is exactly that,” she said.
Dive Insight:
Agresta has recently held two finance chief posts. At Pluralsight, he quickly rose from senior vice president of finance to finance chief, a role which he held for over two years, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Prior to that he was CFO of Skupos, an Insight Venture Partners-funded Series B software company, for nearly three years. Earlier in his career he worked at the Big Four accounting and consulting firm Deloitte, with his roles including audit manager and manager, private equity advisory services.
In taking his new position, Agresta said he was in part drawn to the opportunity by Coupa’s potential to leverage AI as well as by the company’s product, which he used at two of the previous companies he worked for.
“In a world of generative AI, I wanted to be at a place that would be able to capitalize on these market tailwinds,” Agresta said in emailed responses to questions. “Coupa is one of the best positioned companies to benefit from this trend; it has the ability to leverage its over $6 trillion in transactional data, which grows by more than $1 trillion every year, to fuel its community-generated AI.”
As Coupa’s new CFO, Agresta said he will oversee finance, accounting, enterprise digital enablement, corporate development and the legal functions with the goal of guiding the company to become a multi-billion dollar revenue industry leader. In terms of the company’s strategy, Agresta said Coupa aims to help companies make all their spend autonomous.
“Coupa was founded on a bedrock of creating a new category — business spend management (BSM) — that helped businesses be more strategic with indirect spend to improve business growth, performance, and profitability,” he said. “It’s now our mission to help businesses better manage total spend — both indirect and direct — to manage all spend autonomously.”
Agresta also didn’t rule out going public again. “Re-entering the public markets is certainly a scenario that we’re evaluating,” he said. “We're laser focused on building a long-term profitable growth strategy with the foundation of that strategy being the creation of value for our customers. We believe that by focusing on the customer, the capital and ownership structure will take care of itself.”
