Jeff Bezos-backed accounting start-up hits $1.2 billion valuation after new funding round

Accounting start-up Pilot raised a new round of funding from Jeff Bezos and different Silicon Valley buyers to assist small companies outsource back-office duties.

The San Francisco-based firm closed a $100 million funding round this week, doubling its valuation to $1.2 billion. The round was led by Bezos‘s enterprise capital agency Bezos Expeditions and hedge fund Whale Rock Capital, with participation from Sequoia and Index Ventures. Stripe and its founders, Patrick and John Collison, in addition to former VMware CEO Diane Greene had beforehand invested in Pilot.

Its co-founder and CEO Waseem Daher interned at Amazon sixteen years in the past earlier than beginning two different firms. One was purchased by Oracle, the opposite by Dropbox. He likened Pilot’s use case to an issue solved by Amazon Web Services: let builders concentrate on constructing a enterprise as an alternative of determining host a web site.

“There’s all of this annoying, tedious, scary and vital back-office stuff that it’s worthwhile to do as a small enterprise proprietor,” Daher advised CNBC in an interview. “Owners ought to concentrate on operating an organization at scale, and Pilot ought to be doing the again workplace stuff for you.”

Pilot’s workers — largely former accountants — are assigned to work immediately with a small enterprise. They tackle administrative duties like payroll, book-keeping, taxes and payments. The start-up has partnered with firms together with American Express, Bill.com, Gusto and Stripe. Daher describes it as “tech-enabled,” however Pilot itself isn’t a software program firm. The firm makes cash from subscription charges.

Pilot’s income roughly doubled up throughout the pandemic regardless of small companies bearing the brunt of Covid-related shutdowns. The firm’s income has roughly tripled yearly because it was based in 2017, Daher mentioned.

He attributed current progress to consciousness of automation as individuals run their firms from dwelling. More millennials are additionally beginning small companies, and are typically extra open to outsourcing by a tech platform, Daher mentioned.

“People wish to do that just about. They do not wish to should go all the way down to Main Street with their field of receipts and go to their accountant’s workplace,” he mentioned.

Pilot is Daher’s third firm with co-founders Jeff Arnold, Pilot’s COO, and Jessica McKellar, the corporate’s CTO. The group met as undergraduates at MIT within the laptop membership.

Index Ventures companion Mark Goldberg, an early investor in Pilot, first met the group of founders at Dropbox almost a decade in the past. While the narrative in Silicon Valley proper is “centered on utilizing software program to optimize for all the things,” Goldberg mentioned Pilot is taking the “reverse method” by including individuals again within the combine.

“Nobody begins an organization to take care of BS within the again workplace. You need somebody to extract that ache level,” Goldberg mentioned. “People don’t desire software program, they need peace of thoughts.”