Cloud accounting software provider FreshBooks has raised $30 million U.S. in a funding round led by Oak Investment Partners, a U.S.-based venture capital (VC) firm. The other investors in the round were Atlas Venture and Canadian VC firm Georgian Partners.
FreshBooks, which is based in Toronto, provides cloud-based accounting to small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs). It currently serves more than 10 million users in that market, and armed with its $30 million in funding, it plans out to continue to reach out to even more of those SMB customers, says Mike McDerment, co-founder and CEO.
“We’ve done a lot of things over the years to build up to this point. We’ve built a market-leading product, we’ve had a plan, we’ve had a culture, the company, the team,” he says. “The next thing we really needed to realize our ambitions to grow a global tech company headquarters in Toronto … capital will help us do that.”
He adds going forward, FreshBooks will probably continue to use a lot of the same strategies to reach SMB owners. The team is also spending more time reaching out to accountants, who may recommend FreshBooks to their SMB customers.
While FreshBooks has been around since 2003, this is actually the first time the company has accepted funding from VCs. In a blog post from chief financial officer Mark MacLeod, he noted the company wanted to work with the right VCs before making any funding commitments.
“We were looking first and foremost for a long-term orientation. The round was led by Oak Investment Partners,” he wrote. “They have an unbelievable track record of helping grow hugely valuable companies … They quietly go about doing this. You don’t hear about them on Twitter. They just deliver the goods.”
FreshBooks also has plans to boost its employee headcount, going from 150 employees to 400 by 2016. Right now, it’s seeking engineers, product managers, and marketers, looking to add them to their headquarters in Toronto.
