Millions of American businesses still paid their suppliers with paper checks, long after their customers paid by card. AvidXchange went after that gap. The Charlotte company scanned incoming invoices, routed them for approval, and paid suppliers electronically, keeping a small fee on many payments. When it went public in October 2021, fintech stocks were near their peak, and offices emptied by the pandemic had no one left to open the mail.

The Midsize Back Office

Michael Praeger co-founded AvidXchange in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 2000. The company focused on the midsize market: property managers, builders, and other firms too big for spreadsheets and too small for costly corporate systems. The bet was that automating the accounts payable office would pay twice. Customers would save on paperwork, and AvidXchange would earn money from the payments that flowed through its network.

Public, Then Private Again

AvidXchange priced an upsized offering at $25 a share, the top of its range, raising about $660 million. It began trading on the Nasdaq as AVDX on October 13, 2021. The stock drifted far below its offering price. In October 2025 the private equity firm TPG and the payments company Corpay took AvidXchange private for $10 a share, valuing it at about $2.2 billion.

Cover: Couple Reading a Letter, Suzuki Harunobu. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a couple reading a letter (the mail that brings the bills).