ProSpend CEO bypasses venture capital funding to succeed in $19B market

Sharon Nouh had a promising enterprise — and a couple of major obstacles keeping her from making it to the top: She had a startup.

A mere 4% of startups get their funding from venture capitalists. The likelihood of securing venture capital gets even smaller from there for female and minority founders — something Nouh experienced firsthand — 98% of all venture capital funding in recent years went to male founders.

Nouh founded her SaaS business working as a solopreneur more than a decade ago in Australia. What started as an expense tracking module, called Expensemanager, has evolved under Nouh’s savvy leadership to become ProSpend, a highly adaptable and configurable spend management platform that keeps innovating to help businesses digitize and automate all their spending processes.

“We sit alongside the finance systems as the workflow tool to manage spend, which is done by the users with support from ProSpend’s approval workflows and automation,” Nouh explains. “Then we push that data into the customer’s finance system.”

Innovative, certainly, but surprisingly not attractive to VC investors — not in its early days, anyway.

A true bootstrapping success story

Nouh tried the venture capital path years ago only to discover VCs weren’t willing to take a chance on a startup they didn’t think could compete with global players in the market, ignoring the young company’s qualifications and its promising early growth.

Bank loans appeared to be the SaaS startup’s least costly capital option, but without the hard assets the banks required, the potential cost from personal guarantees and warrants to secure these loans was just too great.

Nouh made an ambitious decision to stay the course and bootstrap her startup without the help of venture capital. “We toughed it out on our own, and we proved them wrong,” she says.

The company continued to grow on its own steam, even through the pandemic. “The secret to our success has been always listening to our customers — delivering innovative products that solve their real business problems,” Nouh says, “and having a passionate team of forward-looking industry leaders with comprehensive FinTech knowledge and expertise.”

Scaling a SaaS startup with non-dilutive debt

In 2021, as the world emerged from COVID-19 and started to settle into “a new normal,” Nouh saw a timely opportunity to accelerate growth, but she needed a quick injection of capital.

Her company had gained enough traction that Nouh felt confident she could bypass VC funding to hit her targets. Nouh didn’t want to dilute equity, either, so she looked for debt resources.

Nouh eventually discovered a non-dilutive debt financing solution that best fit the startup’s needs when she connected that year with Lighter Capital through Heads Over Heels (now Apropela), an Australian networking platform for female entrepreneurs.

“Lighter Capital was perfect for us,” said Nouh, “and I liked that if we needed more funding, we could go back and get it as the business evolved.”

As CEO of ProSpend, Nouh leads more than 25 employees and has a book of over 550 customers (with very little customer churn) that includes international brands such as Nike, KFC, Baskin-Robbins and Best&Less. Her company has become a major player in a multibillion-dollar market without ever taking any VC money.

Putting the capital to work

The enterprise has raised more than $2M AUD in non-dilutive funding over four rounds from Lighter Capital, each time propelling the company forward and amplifying its value within a competitive market.

ProSpend has used its funds from Lighter Capital to:

• Execute a rebrand to better position the company within the market

• Launch products including Virtual Cards and E-Invoicing

• Expand the marketing team and develop its strategy

• Hire more developers and engineers

Since rebranding from Expensemanager to ProSpend in February 2023, the company has broadened its position as a leader in the business spend management market, which is valued at more than $19 billion USD globally and is predicted to grow at an annual rate of 11.9% to reach more than $46 billion by 2030.

The exit and global expansion

The clearest proof that Nouh's strategy worked came in November 2025, when ProSpend was acquired by ISH, a UK-based software group that builds and scales founder-run SaaS companies while keeping their teams and culture in place. 

Rather than an ending, the deal was a deliberate step toward a goal Nouh had held for years: to turn ProSpend into a global business.

With ISH's backing, ProSpend is preparing a compliant, locally supported launch in the UK and Ireland from 2026, while continuing to operate under its own brand and leadership in ANZ — investing in local hiring, partnerships, and customer success to meet growing regional demand. For existing customers, it's business as usual: the same platform, contracts, data residency, support, and teams.

"We've always wanted ProSpend to be an Aussie-founded global company," said Nouh. "With ISH's backing, we can scale faster, strengthen compliance and security, and invest further in the product and our customers while staying true to the mission of helping finance teams take control of company spend."

Crucially, Nouh reached that exit on her own terms — with more of the company, and more of its founding vision, intact than a VC-backed path would have left her. As she put it, the exit was never really about exiting: 

"It was about giving ProSpend the opportunity to grow internationally. What mattered deeply to me was not selling out, but preserving our values, our people, and the vision of what ProSpend stands for. So I'm not stepping out, but stepping in to this next chapter with genuine excitement."