Bill.com Raises Another $8.5 Million To Streamline Business Bill Payments

Bill management and payments service Bill.com has raised another $8.5 million in additional funding. The new round was led by Jafco Ventures with DCM, Emergence Capital and August Capital participating. This brings Bill.com’s total funding to over $25 million.

Bill.com helps businesses streamline the confusing processes that are involved in paying bills at large companies. Unlike your typical personal bill payments, which simply require hopping onto your bank’s website and transferring funds, large busineses typically have fairly complex approval processes in place before a bill gets paid: various managers have to sign off on the bills, and then they have to get sent to the finance department that handles the actual payments. In fact, businesses are still shuffling and filing paper and printing, signing and mailing paper checks.

Bill.com allows businesses and accounting firms to enable digital bill payments. You fax your bills to a specified phone number (any bills that come in digitally can simply be Emailed into the service). Bill.com automatically scans the document, and lets you email it to anyone who needs to sign off on the bill before it is paid (mangers click a special link to indicate they approve). Once everyone has signed off, the finance department can use Bill.com’s online payment system to make the actual transactions.

And Bill.com’s platform is gaining traction. Bill.com’s monthly revenue, total number of customers and unique paid vendors all increased by over 800% in 2009. Bill.com, which raised $8.5 million last fall as well, was founded by René Lacerte, who previously founded online payroll service PayCycle, which was acquired last month by Intuit for $170 million.