10.August.2021 – Toronto-based, FreshBooks a cloud computing software company that is SMBs focused, announced that it raised USD 80.75 Million in a Series E funding round and USD 50 Million in debt round.
This equity financing round was led by Accomplice, pulling the company to a Unicorn status with a valuation of more than USD 1 Billion. The participants in this funding round were Gaingels, Manulife, BMO Technology and Innovation and JP Morgan. Barclays also joined the list of investors in the company.
FreshBooks has now accumulated a total of USD 200 Million in funding since its inception. It plans to utilize this capital in marketing and sales, R&D and strategic acquisitions.
FreshBooks was initiated by Mike McDerment in 2003, having its headquarters in Toronto. It developed a cloud-based accounting SaaS platform to let SMBs and self-employed people design their own payroll, invoice, expenses, payments and financial reporting easier.
FreshBooks has a customer base of more than 30 million people in over 160 Countries. The idea of FreshBooks came into McDerment’s mind when he used to run a small designing agency, he witnessed that word and excel does not have too many reliable features to create a professional-looking invoice. So, he found his own solution for this by coding FreshBooks.
Till 2014, the company was self-funded but Mike planned to make a business reach outside investors, thus FreshBooks raised its first USD 30 Million from Accomplice, Georgian Partners, and Oak Investment Partners.
FreshBooks currently has a workforce of more than 500 in Mexico, Canada, Croatia, the United States and the Netherlands.
The company will also use its new funding toward investing in markets that are becoming more regulated and helping owners manage their finances through “simplistic workflows,” according to Epperson.“The need for owners to manage their business digitally has accelerated, and this has changed how small business owners work with bookkeepers and accountants. The funding comes as an injection of confidence in our mission to digitally enable small businesses.”
The pandemic also brought the need for us to understand how seismic events affect our customer base, Don Epperson, the executive director, FreshBooks said.
“After analyzing FreshBooks’ own proprietary data, we learned that businesses owned by women were taking three times longer to recover in the U.S. versus businesses owned by men,” Epperson said. “This stat laid the foundation for conducting more research into how the pandemic was affecting businesses across multiple industries and entering into data-sharing partnerships with local governments to help policymakers enact change in the support available to small business owners.”
Jeff Fagnan, founder and managing partner at Cambridge Accomplice said – “With more people choosing self-employment, the FreshBooks team fundamentally believes in the growth of small businesses, and the importance of helping these businesses scale. As insiders, we have better context for how the company is scaling and how the market is growing, and this is why FreshBooks is our largest investment to date.”
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