One of the greatest ache factors for startups and small companies is maintaining with again workplace duties akin to bookkeeping and managing taxes.
QuickBooks, it appears, simply doesn’t at all times lower it.
Three-time co-founders Waseem Daher, Jeff Arnold, and Jessica McKellar shaped Pilot with the mission of affordably offering again workplace providers to startups and SMBs. With over 1,000 prospects, it has gained severe traction over the years. And Pilot has now additionally acquired validation from some big-name buyers. On Friday, the firm introduced a $100 million Series C that doubles the firm’s valuation to $1.2 billion.
Bezos Expeditions — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ private investment fund — and Whale Rock Capital (a $10 billion hedge fund) co-led the spherical, which additionally included participation from Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Authentic Ventures and others.
Stripe and Index Ventures co-led Pilot’s $40 million Series B in April 2019. The newest financing brings the firm’s whole funding raised to over $158 million since its 2017 inception.
The founding staff definitely has a formidable observe file, having based and offered two earlier firms: Ksplice (to Oracle) and Zupli (to Dropbox).
Pilot’s pitch is about extra than simply software program. The firm combines its software program with accountants to do issues akin to present “CFO Services” to SMBs with out a full-stack finance staff. It additionally offers month-to-month variance evaluation for all its bookkeeping prospects, basically serving as a controller for these firms, to allow them to make higher budgeting and spending selections.
It additionally helps firms entry small enterprise tax credit they might not have in any other case recognized about.
Last 12 months, Pilot accomplished greater than $three billion in bookkeeping transactions for its prospects, which vary from pre-revenue startups to bigger firms with greater than $30M of income a 12 months. Customers embrace Bolt, r2c and Pathrise, amongst others.
Pilot has additionally inked a variety of co-marketing partnerships with firms akin to American Express, Bill.com, Brex, Carta, Gusto, Rippling, Stripe, SVB, and Techstars.
Ironically, Pilot says it aspires to the “AWS of SMB backoffice.” (In truth, co-founder Waseem Daher began his profession as an intern at Amazon). Put merely, Pilot needs to handle all these again workplace duties so firms can focus extra on development and successful enterprise.
Pilot strives to supply an “exceptional customer experience,” which is mirrored in the indisputable fact that over 80% of the firm’s enterprise is pushed by buyer referrals and natural curiosity, in accordance to Daher.
Whale Rock Partner Kristov Paulus mentioned that white-glove customer support expertise and Pilot’s “carefully-engineered” software program make a highly effective mixture.
“We look forward to supporting Pilot in their vision to make back office services as easy-to-use, scalable, and ubiquitous as AWS has with the cloud,” he mentioned.
Pilot’s mannequin jogs my memory a lot of that of ScaleFactor’s, an Austin-based startup that raised $100 million in a 12 months earlier than it crashed and burned. But the distinction on this case is that Pilot appears to have glad prospects.
