- Digits, an accounting fintech for small businesses, has raised $65 million from SoftBank.
- The startup was set up by Crashlytics cofounders, Jeff Seibert and Wayne Chang.
- Digits has now raised funding from Bessemer, GV, SoftBank, and 20VC without a pitch deck.
Digits, a startup that offers real-time financial account reporting to small businesses, just raised $65 million in a round led by Japanese investing giant SoftBank.
The San Francisco-based fintech was founded by Jeff Seibert and Wayne Chang, the entrepreneurs behind Crashlytics, a software startup that was acquired by Twitter and then Google. The pair’s new startup uses machine learning to visualize business accounts while also offering additional functionality like search and data extraction.
Digits secured the fresh funds after a call with Masayoshi Son, the billionaire CEO of SoftBank, who was impressed with the company’s offering.
“We met Masa over
Zoom
and in less than 30 minutes we had a lead investor for our Series C funding,” Chang told Insider.
Eylul Kayin, an investor at the SoftBank’s Vision Fund, said it was rare for a portfolio company to be valuable to its other businesses but stated that Digits was “useful to all of them.”
Digits plans to focus on the US market for now with the latest tranche of funding going toward improving its underlying tech and scaling the business.
“The current state of business finance has fallen way behind the times,” Chang said. “This means companies have to manually update their understanding of the company’s financials by hand. The process is tedious, error-prone, and time-intensive. This is the core reason why any questions to your accountant or finance team take days or weeks — they have to manually do the calculations.”
Chang said that finance was reactive and that there was no way to “get in front of anything” because data could only be examined “after the fact.”
Funding also came from Harry Stebbings’ 20VC Growth, alongside existing investors GV and Benchmark. The latest round brings Digits total funding to $97.5 million and values the company at $565 million. Digits told Insider all of its rounds have been pre-emptive or oversubscribed meaning it hasn’t needed to create a pitch deck for investors.
“Small businesses are a group of customers that have been left in the dark ages,” Stebbings told Insider. “Digits offers search and granular data extraction which helps companies retain speed at scale. Finances are so important and companies need to have a better quality of data available to them when making strategic decisions.”
Credit: Source link
