One of the biggest pain points for start-ups and small businesses is keeping up with back office tasks such as bookkeeping and tax management.
QuickBooks, it seems, just don’t always cut it.
Three-time co-founders Waseem Daher, Jeff Arnold, and Jessica McKellar created Pilot with the intention of providing back office services to start up costs and SMBs. With over 1,000 customers, it has gained a great grip over the years. And Pilot has now received confirmation from some big name investors. On Friday, the company announced a $ 100 million Series C that doubles the company’s valuation to $ 1.2 billion.
Bezos Expeditions – personal investment fund Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon – and Whale Rock Capital (a $ 10 billion hedge fund) co-led the tour, which also included a partnership from Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Authentic Ventures and others.
Stripe and Index Ventures co-directed the $ 40 million Series B Pilot in April 2019. The latest funding brings the company’s total funding raised to more than $ 158 million since its inception in 2017.
The founding team certainly has an amazing history he previously founded and sold two companies: Ksplice (to Oracle) and Zupli (to Dropbox).
Pilot pitch is about more than just software. The company combines its software with accountants to do things like “CFO Services” to SMBs without a full stack of finance team. It also provides monthly volatility analysis for all book buyers, essentially serving as an administrator for these companies, so that they can make better budget and spending decisions.
It also helps companies get to small business tax credits they may not have known about.
Last year, Pilot completed more than $ 3 billion in bookkeeping deals for its customers, ranging from pre-revenue start-ups to larger companies with more than $ 30M of annual income. Customers include Bolt, r2c and Pathrise, among others.
Pilot has also established several co-marketing partnerships with companies such as American Express, Bill.com, Brex, Carta, Gusto, Rippling, Stripe, SVB, and Techstars.
Ironically, Pilot states that it is targeting “AWS of SMB backup.” (In fact, co-founder Waseem Daher began his career as an employee at Amazon). Simply put, Pilot wants to focus on these back office functions so that companies can focus more on growing and earning business.
Pilot seeks to “provide a unique customer experience,” which is exemplified by the fact that over 80% of the company’s business is driven by customer referrals and organic interest, according to Daher .
Whale Rock Partner Kristov Paulus said white-messenger messenger service experience and “carefully engineered” Pilot software make for a powerful combination.
“We look forward to supporting Pilot in their vision to make back office services as user-friendly, scalable and ubiquitous as AWS with the cloud,” he said.
The Pilot model reminds me a lot of that of ScaleFactor, an Austin-based startup that raised $ 100 million a year earlier fell and burned. But the difference in this case is that Pilot seems to have satisfied customers.