More than a decade after it was founded, Invoice2go is announcing that it has raised $35 million in its first round of external funding.
The round, a Series A, was led by Accel Partners and Ribbit Capital, with Accel partner Ryan Sweeney joining Invoice2go’s board of directors. In addition, Accel CEO-in-Residence Greg Waldorf has joined Invoice2go as, yes, its new CEO.
The company sells invoicing apps that work on mobile phones, tablets, and desktop/laptop computers. Waldorf will actually be based in Palo Alto, where the Australian company has opened an office. He said the Silicon Valley team will focus on growth and marketing (though not exclusively), while the product and engineering teams remain in Sydney, where they’ll continue to be led by Invoice2go founder Chris Strode.
Waldorf noted that joining a company as chief executive was the likely outcome of his CEO-in-Residence role, which was not an investing position and basically gave him “an elongated time horizon to find the right role.”
He’s currently sitting on the board of Accel-backed real estate company Trulia, and he previously spent five years as the CEO of dating site eHarmony. Moving into invoicing doesn’t seem like an obvious next step, but he told me he’s particularly interested in building paid subscription businesses: “There is nothing as difficult, but also satisfying, as getting a customer or an end user to be willing to pay for software.”
Nonetheless, Waldorf admitted that there was “a little bit of an evolution” in his outlook. He used to consider invoicing to be “a subset of accounting” (and therefore mostly useful for taxes and bookkeeping), but over time he realized that it was crucial to a small business’ cashflow — so Invoice2go could save businesses time and help them get paid more quickly.
The company says it’s now used by more than 100,000 businesses in more than 50 countries, with customers invoicing $10 billion annually. Looking ahead, Waldorf said he hopes to continue the company’s international growth, particularly in English-speaking countries, by doing more to localize the product and to adapt the workflow to different geographies.