Startup Pilot, backed by Jeff Bezos, achieves $ 1.2 billion valuation

The accounting startup Pilot has raised a new round of financing from Jeff Bezos and other Silicon Valley investors to help small businesses outsource back-office tasks.

The San Francisco-based company closed a $ 100 million financing round this week, doubling its valuation to $ 1.2 billion. The round was led by Bezos’ venture capital firm, Bezos Expeditions, and by the hedge fund Whale Rock Capital, with the participation of Sequoia and Index Ventures. Stripe and its founders, Patrick and John Collison, as well as former VMware CEO Diane Greene, had previously invested in Pilot.

Its co-founder and CEO Waseem Daher did an internship at Amazon sixteen years ago, before starting two other companies. One was purchased by Oracle, the other by Dropbox. He compared the Pilot use case to a problem solved by Amazon Web Services: allowing developers to focus on building a business instead of figuring out how to host a website.

“There are all these annoying, tedious, scary and important back-office things that you need to do as a small business owner,” Daher told CNBC in an interview. “Owners should focus on running a company on a large scale, and Pilot should take care of the office for you.

Pilot employees – mainly ex-accountants – are assigned to work directly with a small business. They take on administrative tasks like payroll, accounting, taxes and bills. The start-up has partnered with companies such as American Express, Bill.com, Gusto and Stripe. Daher describes it as “technology-enabled”, but Pilot itself is not a software company. The company makes money from subscription fees.

Pilot’s revenue practically doubled during the pandemic, although small businesses were impacted by Covid-related outages. The company’s revenue has nearly tripled each year since it was founded in 2017, Daher said.

He attributed the recent growth to awareness of automation, as people run their businesses at home. More millennials are also starting small businesses and tend to be more open to outsourcing through a technology platform, said Daher.

“People want to do this virtually. They don’t want to have to go to the main street with their receipt box and visit their accountant’s office, ”he said.

Pilot is Daher’s third company with co-founders Jeff Arnold, COO of Pilot, and Jessica McKellar, CTO of the company. The group met as undergraduate students at MIT at the computer club.

Index Ventures partner Mark Goldberg, one of the first investors in Pilot, met the group of founders of Dropbox almost a decade ago. While the correct Silicon Valley narrative is “focused on using software to optimize everything,” Goldberg said Pilot is taking the “opposite approach”, adding people back to the mix.

“Nobody opens a company to deal with BS in the back office. You want someone to get out of this pain point,” said Goldberg. “People don’t want software, they want peace of mind.”