Spend Management for Contractors: Coast Raises $35m

Coast, the New York fintech that sells fuel cards, corporate cards and spend management for contractors and other field-based businesses, raised $35 million in a round led by Thomvest Ventures, the company said on October 22, 2026.

Intuit Ventures, Small World Capital and Alpha Square Group joined as new investors. The money will fund bill pay, accounts payable and AI-driven expense automation, the next steps in what Coast calls a financial platform for the physical economy.

For accountants and bookkeepers serving plumbers, electricians, HVAC firms and construction companies, the round matters because it concerns the ledger. Fuel, vehicle and supplier spend in those businesses usually arrives as a pile of receipts and card statements. A platform that codes it by job and vehicle before it reaches the books changes how much cleaning a bookkeeper does each month.

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Who backed the spend management for contractors round

Thomvest first invested in Coast in 2024. Existing investors ICONIQ Growth, Accel, Insight Partners, Better Tomorrow Ventures, Avid Ventures, Vintage Investment Partners, Colle Capital, Synchrony, RXR and The Fintech Fund also took part.

The new round follows a $40 million Series B that Coast announced on July 18, 2024, led by ICONIQ Growth. At that point the company had raised nearly $100 million in equity since its founding in late 2020, and it said thousands of fleet-operating businesses used the product.

Daniel Simon, Coast’s founder and chief executive, tied the timing to demand for trades labour and construction capacity.

“The AI data center boom is pulling construction, HVAC, electrical, utility, and transportation into overdrive.” Daniel Simon, Founder and Chief Executive, Coast

Coast cited labour data to make the case. Demand for HVAC engineers has climbed by close to 78% since 2022, and vacancies for electricians, welders and construction specialists have risen by 30%.

As those firms grow, Coast said, many still run on a patchwork of general-purpose cards, banking services and fleet products that were never designed for them.

What Coast sells to field businesses

Coast began with a fuel card and has since added corporate cards, expense management and bill payment. Its customers range from construction, plumbing and landscaping to pest control, solar, energy, oil and gas, and utilities.

The product tracks spend at vehicle and driver level and records fuel grade and gallons. It supports job costing and offers telematics-linked card controls. Expense management is included with the cards at no extra cost, according to the Coast website, which also lists a $25,000 fuel fraud guarantee.

Bill pay is provided through Grasshopper Bank. Coast puts the average saving for fleet customers at $30,000 a year and the speed-up in closing the books at 1.5 days.

Those are Coast’s own figures, and the company has published no independent audit of them. A bookkeeper judging spend management for contractors will want to test the numbers against a client’s own fuel and card history.

Where the $35 million will go

Coast named three areas for the new capital. The first is AI-driven savings and automated expense management. The software steers drivers to the most cost-effective fuel and purchases, and handles approvals and reconciliation without manual effort.

The second is a broader payments and finance offering, including bill pay and accounts payable. Supplier invoices would then sit beside card spending in a single view, so a job’s materials, fuel and subcontractor bills could be read together.

The third is embedded partnerships with telematics, fleet management and field service providers. Customers can already manage Coast card controls inside Samsara and Fleetio. Vehicle location, driver identity and odometer readings let the system detect off-route fuel purchases, flag possible misuse or deactivate a card directly.

That last feature is a control, not an accounting convenience. Fuel card fraud is a leakage problem for any firm running a van fleet, and the telematics link gives the finance team evidence rather than a suspicion.

What Intuit Ventures means for the ledger

Coast said Intuit Ventures’ involvement brings it closer to a deep integration partner that is central to the operations of many of its clients. The announcement does not name the partner’s product and does not mention QuickBooks.

Coast’s site already lists integrations with QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop, as well as NetSuite and Sage Intacct. They categorise transactions using the customer’s existing fields and push complete transactions, receipts included, into the ledger with one click.

No new Intuit product integration has been announced alongside the round. Coast has not said whether the investment changes how its data reaches QuickBooks.

The practical question for accountants is how much of that coding is automatic. Where the sync holds, spend management for contractors shifts reconciliation from the bookkeeper to the card platform. Where it does not, a second feed of transactions can create duplicates against the bank feed. Firms advising QuickBooks users should check how the two are matched before recommending a card. Our guide to data integration in accounting firms covers the wider problem.

The competition for contractor spend

Coast competes with general-purpose spend platforms and with specialist fleet card issuers. The general platforms are well funded. Ramp raised $1.85 billion at a $60 billion valuation in a round led by Dragoneer, and it has since launched Stack, an AI accounting operating system.

Older expense vendors such as Emburse cover enterprise and midmarket travel and expense. None of them is built around a fuel grade, an odometer reading or a job code.

Coast’s argument is that field businesses need that depth. The risk is that horizontal platforms add vehicle-level controls faster than Coast adds accounts payable and general finance features.

The trades are also a customer base that has been slow to adopt finance software. Owners tend to buy on fuel price and rebates first, which is why Coast leads with per-gallon rebates and cashback and treats expense management as an inclusion rather than a product.

What to watch in spend management for contractors

The signal to follow is the accounts payable launch. Coast has not given a date for bill pay beyond what it already offers, or for the wider suite, and it has not said which accounting systems the new products will sync with first.

Once supplier invoices sit beside card spend, Coast moves from a card issuer to a competitor of the payables tools that bookkeepers already run for clients. The next test is whether Coast publishes customer numbers, card volume or an Intuit integration to show how far the platform has spread through the trades.