Former Hyperdrive startup Beanworks, the “accounts payable evolved” startup from Vancouver has been selected to participate in a two-week Google-sponsored accelerator program called BlackBox.
BlackBox’s mission is to “empower entrepreneurs around the world,” and recently extended its partnership with Google for Entrepreneurs to launch two program cycles in 2014. The popular immersion program provides international startup founders with the opportunity to learn best practices of building and scaling technology companies, and experience the best of the Silicon Valley ecosystem.
Beanworks, meanwhile, was profiled in BetaKit in December. It’s a cloud-based accounting solution that takes mountains of paper invoices and turns them digital, allowing accounting personnel to see, through workflow and powerful analytics, what they couldn’t see before (until the invoice had already been recorded).
Beanworks was founded in 2012 and has employees working out of Vancouver, Montreal, Victoria and Prince George. The company actually evolved out of a previous company called Bean Services. Current CEO Catherine Dahl was an investor and eventual cofounder in the company, doing sales and implementation. Dahl and a few others did a management buyout of the intellectual property and customer base, and formed Beanworks in January 2012. It took them a year to rebuild the entire platform, but the existing 1000 or so customers remained patient. The new platform was just released and the company is processing between 25,000 and 35,000 invoices a month.
It looks like the opportunity to head down south for two weeks will serve the startup well. BlackBox said it doubled its network of companies since 2013 – from 8 to 16 companies – while including twice as many women as last year – 50 percent of the founders are women.
“We’ve seen firsthand that entrepreneurship is thriving in communities all over the world,” said Google for Entrepreneurs director Mary Grove. “One of our goals is to connect our thriving partner network entrepreneur communities with one another and back to Silicon Valley. Blackbox Connect does this so well, bringing founders from across the globe to work and live alongside one another in an immersive two week program. Our hope is that founders drink from a firehose and can return home inspired, energized, and connected with a broader community.”