Participated · Seed · Jul 2013

Bench combines intuitive software with a dedicated accounting team to deliver full‑service bookkeeping, tax preparation and advisory for small business customers. The company has relaunched its product to offer an integrated suite — banking, cards, payroll, bookkeeping, taxes and advice — that surfaces real‑time profitability and cash‑flow in the customer’s accounting and tax filings. Bench Core includes a business bank account and debit card in partnership with LendingClub and Stripe, while Bench Flex supports customers with existing banks; Core is priced at $249/month and Flex at $349/month. Bench says the product and integrations (Shopify, Stripe, Freshbooks, Sage, LendingClub, Gusto) aim to centralize and simplify financial operations for entrepreneurs. The company reports it services over 11,000 business owners, employs roughly 650 people, and plans to double its product and technology teams before the end of 2021. Bench positions its roadmap around reaching one million business owners and continuing to reinforce its product and service vision. Bench provides bookkeeping and basic accounting services for SMBs by combining machine learning automation with human bookkeepers. Users connect bank accounts and corporate cards so Bench can track transactions and handle bookkeeping tasks. The company automates roughly 60% of bookkeepers' tasks and has processed about $19 billion in client expenses. Bench offers tiered pricing by transaction volume and has cut prices 10–30% over the last year. The team exceeds 250 employees, including 150 bookkeepers. CEO Ian Crosby says the company will push further on automation to improve service and lower prices. Bench is a Vancouver-based online bookkeeping service that automates accounting tasks for small businesses and independent contractors. It combines software with a live bookkeeping team to deliver monthly bookkeeping for a fee. The service automates accounting tasks and provides customers with a managed bookkeeping offering. The company currently services thousands of business owners and employs 230 people. Bench has raised $33m to date and recently closed a $16m Series B. The company plans to use the funds for product enhancements and the rollout of a new product. Bench (formerly 10sheet) combines software that imports transactions from corporate cards and checking accounts with a one-on-one bookkeeping service that assigns each customer a dedicated Bench accountant. After graduating TechStars the company rebranded and emphasized the human piece of the workflow, adding features such as in-app messaging between customers and their accountants. The startup uses only its own accountants rather than third-party contractors and currently employs 126 people, many of whom are accountants. Bench has been focused on improving the product to deepen the one-on-one relationship and on building a recruitment engine to hire and retain talent. The company is using new funding to make additional hires and to improve its office and onboarding systems. Bench Accounting provides a virtual bookkeeping service that pairs personal (human) bookkeepers with a web-based app to let small business owners collaborate, send documents and view reports. Its professional bookkeepers are recruited across North America and are available to clients via phone, email and the web app. The company was founded in 2012 by Ian Crosby and Jordan Menashy and launched out of TechStars New York. Bench is based in Vancouver and New York City. Financially, the company closed $1M in funding that it says will be used for continued growth among small businesses; this financing is in addition to $2.1M in seed funding raised the previous summer. Bench is hiring to support its expansion plans.

Led · Seed · Jun 2012

SimpleReach is a content data platform that powers measurement and predictive insights for publishers' branded content programs. The platform collects, verifies, normalizes and benchmarks content data to provide marketers with actionable, real-time insights. SimpleReach counts partners such as The New York Times, Condé Nast, Time Inc., and brand customers including Chase, Intel and Accenture. As content marketing has grown among Fortune 500 companies, the company positions itself as the first content data platform to unify fragmented site and channel data and surface content ROI. SimpleReach has raised $24 million in total funding, including $13.3 million since its last disclosed raise. The company says the new capital and recent leadership changes are intended to accelerate growth in the next phase of the business. SimpleReach provides analytics that measure the effectiveness of content and native advertising and assigns each article a 0–99 score predicting how much social traffic it will drive. The platform tracks performance on publisher sites and social channels and enables marketers to promote top articles via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Outbrain, Nativo, StumbleUpon and TripleLift. Major publishers such as The New York Times, Forbes, The Huffington Post and The Atlantic use SimpleReach for native ad measurement, while brands including Intel and Xerox use it for content marketing analysis and promotion. CEO and co‑founder Edward Kim frames the company’s strategy around building a many‑to‑many data marketplace to become a harder‑to‑displace layer in the ecosystem, comparing the ambition to Nielsen and comScore. The company aims to bring content marketing to the same level of technology as online display advertising. SimpleReach previously raised a $1.6M seed round two years earlier. SimpleReach is a NYC-based company that integrates with major social networks' APIs to track engagement for any link in real time and analyze millions of social actions and pageviews daily. Its product, Insight, builds statistical models to predict which pieces of content will be most social and can push interval- or event-based alerts. The team pivoted from an earlier product, The Slide, after the widget was adopted by thousands of publishers and after graduating from AngelPad. SimpleReach targets publishers, brands, and marketers with a freemium approach—focusing on wide free adoption and upselling to paid plans—and already counts launch partners and early paying clients such as Time Inc, Demand Media, and Hearst. The company is staffed by ten employees, nine of whom are engineers or data scientists. SimpleReach raised funding to hire engineers and scale its product.