David Barrett is the founder and chief executive of Expensify, the Portland company whose app scans receipts, files expense reports, and issues a cash-back business card. He founded it in 2008 and still leads it as a public company.
A Programmer in Network Software
Barrett calls himself a lifelong programmer. Before Expensify he led engineering at Red Swoosh, a peer-to-peer content delivery company that Akamai acquired in 2007, and held roles in 3D graphics and virtual reality development.
Building Expensify
He founded Expensify in 2008 around a simple behavior: take a photo of a receipt and let the app do the rest. The company grew by word of mouth, from freelancers to finance teams, to more than 15 million members, and is publicly traded on the Nasdaq as EXFY.
Its 2025 revenue was $142.1 million, up 2% from $139.2 million, with 117 full-time employees at year end. Interchange from the Expensify Card more than doubled to $21.3 million from $9.2 million, and the company added travel booking and Concierge, an AI assistant for expenses.
Competing on Simplicity
Expensify competes with Rydoo, Spendesk, and Pleo. Barrett leads from Portland and plays Minecraft with his daughter in his free time, and his product bet has stayed consistent: make the expense process so quick that finance teams stop chasing receipts. It is the same instinct that runs back to his years as a network engineer: Barrett is an engineer first, and Expensify still treats speed as the feature.
