Accounting startup Pilot raised a new $100m round of funding from Jeff Bezos and other Silicon Valley investors to help small businesses outsource back-office tasks, therefore gaining the unicorn badge.
The Series C round was led by Bezos’s venture capital firm Bezos Expeditions and hedge fund Whale Rock Capital, with participation from Sequoia and Index Ventures. Stripe and its founders, Patrick and John Collison as well as former VMware CEO Diane Greene have previously invested in Pilot.
The investment round’s funds will be used to enable the company to further expand its back-office services.
Launched in 2017, the San Francisco-based company enables small businesses outsource administrative tasks like payroll, taxes, bookkeeping and CFO services. The idea behind the firm was to allow entrepreneurs to focus on building a business instead of other financial tasks.
“There’s all of this annoying, tedious, scary and important back-office stuff that you need to do as a small business owner,” co-founder and CEO Waseem Daher said. “Owners should focus on running a company at scale, and Pilot should be doing the back office stuff for you.”
Pilot’s revenue roughly doubled up during the pandemic despite the repercussions of Covid-19. To add on, the company’s revenue has roughly tripled every year since it was founded in 2017, it claimed.
With more than 1,000 customers, Pilot has raised over $150m to date, it said. The company completed more than $3bn in bookkeeping transactions for its customers in 2020, which range from pre-revenue startups to established companies which generate more than $30m revenue a year. It has also established marketing partnerships with other industry leaders including American Express, Bill.com, Brex, Carta, Gusto, Rippling, Stripe, SVB and Techstars.
“Since the earliest days of my career, including an internship at Amazon in 2005, I’ve been inspired by Jeff’s relentless focus on delivering an exceptional customer experience. We’ve brought that same DNA to Pilot’s customer-centric approach: over 80% of our business is driven by customer referrals and organic interest,” Daher added.
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