Toronto startup FreshBooks, the online cloud accounting software for freelancers and professionals, has raised a $30 million funding round from Oak Investment Partners with participation from Atlas Venture and Georgian Partners.
Mike McDerment started the successful startup in 2003, and quietly grew the company to prominence, even without funding. In the last two years they’ve more than doubled their user base to over 10 million with the help of its mobile apps.
“Small business owners are grossly under-served when it comes to accounting software. They don’t have enough choice, and vendors treat them as if one size fits all,” said the CEO McDerment. “The result is they are forced to use tools that are complex — or worse, use Word and Excel to run their businesses. Neither of these options helps make running a business easy and efficient. That’s where FreshBooks comes in. We’re the only company exclusively focused on the needs of service-based businesses, ironically, the largest segment of the small business market.”
FreshBooks said that its product reduces the amount of time spent invoicing by 60 percent, helping users get paid five days faster by making it easy to create and track invoices, capture expenses, track time for staff and contractors, and generate reports.
“FreshBooks is growing the cloud accounting software market by delivering a solution that is designed for the millions of small business owners that want to run their businesses without having to learn accounting,” said Ann Lamont of Oak Investment Partners. “Given our focus on high-growth financial services technology, partnering with FreshBooks is a natural fit. We look forward to helping FreshBooks realize their vision of building the market-leading accounting solution built exclusively for small service-based business owners.”
FreshBooks will grow from 150 people today to 400 employees by 2016, and is currently hiring developers, product managers and marketing experts.
