Pilot is the largest US back office provider for small and startups. Today, it announced that it had closed a Series C round of $60 million led by Sequoia Capital. This brings its total funding up to $120million with contributions from Index Ventures, Stripe, and Index Ventures. Pilot will benefit from the additional pay increase to expand its back office services. These services eliminate distractions and allow businesses to concentrate on their success in difficult business environments.
Pat Grady, a partner at Sequoia says that “back office tasks such as bookkeeping can be expensive, time-consuming and difficult for small businesses.” “Pilot offers a painless, even enjoyable, back office experience by combining sophisticated software with a concierge approach. Pilot makes the back office easy, scalable, and available on demand, just like AWS did with computing.
Pilot is accelerating its efforts to provide SMBs with the same financial resources as large corporations. The announcement of this investment comes as Pilot continues to grow. Pilot has been helping SMBs overcome common hurdles by providing them with access to tools previously available only to large finance departments. Pilot offers the following services to help SMBs:
Maximize your financial growth and expansion. Many SMBs don’t have access to a CFO or a team of financial analysts that can assist them in making important financial decisions. Pilot CFO Services provides financial planning and strategies that increase growth, cash flow, and profitability.
Manage your spending. While large corporations have controllers who can analyze and document trends in expenditures, the vast majority of SMBs don’t have this ability. Pilot provides monthly variance analyses to all of its bookkeeping clients. This allows SMBs optimize their planning and spend.
Small businesses can get tax rebates A R&D payroll credit up to $250,000 is one advantage available to small businesses that are often overlooked. Pilot assists small businesses with locating and securing tax credits worth millions of dollar for growth and employment.
Pilot’s clients range from established businesses with over $30M in annual revenues to pre-revenue startup companies. As of 2020, Pilot had more than $3B in bookkeeping transactions.
Three-time co-founders Jessica McKellar and Waseem Dhar, Jeff Arnold, created Pilot to address the issues they faced when starting their previous businesses.
“Our first job after college was to own a Boston business. After a week of sales, customer services, product development, and customer service, I would have to do a lot of manual, tedious accounting work.” Waseem Dhar, co-founder, CEO of Pilot said that Pilot was the answer to our business problems.
He said, “We will be in a position to make the solution for a better backoffice a reality for more organisations than ever before through our relationship avec Sequoia.”
A client who raised over $75 million in fundraising said, “The Pilot team was our partner since our earliest days, before we had the revenue, to post-series. They have helped us develop and allowed us to concentrate on our business, not our books.
The Pilot
Pilot was introduced to modernize the back office in 2017. Pilot was established in 2017 to provide small businesses with dedicated finance specialists. Pilot hires American full-time employees who are able to get to know the industry. Pilot integrates seamlessly with clients’ existing billing, banking and payroll systems.
Pilot offers regular, accurate bookkeeping, allowing entrepreneurs to focus on their business. It also provides a range of financial services.
Pilot was founded by Waseem Dhar, the CEO of the company, Jeff Arnold, who is the COO, as well as Jessica McKellar, CTO. After two successful exits, they now have three startups. Pilot has raised $120 million and more than 1,000 customers so far.
