Startups

Practice Ignition lands $50M to scale globally

Comment

Founders of Practice Ignition
Image Credits: Founders of Practice Ignition / Practice Ignition

Practice ignition, an Australia-based client engagement and commerce platform for professional service businesses, has raised $50 million (65 million AUD) in a Series C round to accelerate its growth and expand globally. It brings the startup’s total raised to $75 million, said Guy Pearson, CEO and founder of Practice Ignition.

The fresh funding was led by JMI Equity, marking JMI’s first investment in Australia, with participation from previous backers including Tiger Global and EVP, as well as several strategic investors and family office groups.

Practice Ignition will use the proceeds to double down on growing its core key markets in Asia, North America and EMEA through further development, marketing and sales capabilities. The funding will also be used to fuel its U.S. market expansion through strategic partnerships with Gusto, Intuit and Thompson Reuters.

The Series C raise comes on the heels of a series of announcements. Practice Ignition recently unveiled a partnership with Gusto to accelerate the adoption and knowledge of people advisory services. It also announced plans to set up a new R&D team in Toronto, supporting its innovation and customer expansion goals in North America.

Practice Ignition is on an ambitious path to reshape the professional services industry that does business with its customers through its all-in-one client engagement and commerce solution. Its platform integrates digital proposals, payments and automated workflows via leading business apps such as Gusto, Xero, QuickBooks and Zapier to streamline service-based commerce.

Gusto is expanding from payroll into a full suite financial wellness platform

Practice Ignition has experienced tremendous growth since its inception, almost doubling client revenues facilitated via its platform in 2021. The business is on track to drive significant growth in 2022, with more than 1 million clients across six markets and over $2 billion in client revenue under management.

Practice Ignition was founded in 2013 by accounting entrepreneur Guy Pearson and product designer Dane Thomas, who grew frustrated by antiquated manual processes and late payments from clients.

Pearson said its platform was primarily a tool for accountants and bookkeepers, who are still a big part of its customer base. There are a lot of similar workflows in other areas of professional services, such as marketing and consulting, that Practice Ignition believes it can provide value to, he continued. It is continuing to build the platform to suit a broader range of customers.

“We are creating a new category with our client engagement and commerce platform, and we’re only scratching the surface when it comes to market penetration in the global professional services industry,” according to Pearson.

As the global professional services industry faces mounting pressure to digitize its operations and customer interactions in light of COVID-19, which has accelerated digital transformation globally, Practice Ignition is gearing up for a substantial shift, Pearson said.

“As the world moves online, many accountants and bookkeepers have to rapidly shift their business practices and functions to be fully digital overnight. With the transition of accounting from tax compliance to advisory, this means that the need to deliver engaging, quality customer interactions via technology is critical for closing deals, boosting profitability and winning and retaining clients,” Pearson said.

“Guy, Dane and the team at Practice Ignition have built a category-defining business with a world-class team. We have been impressed by the strength of the product, the engaged and loyal customer base and the enormous potential for growth and scale globally,” said Sureel Sheth, principal at JMI Equity.

Zapier buys no-code-focused Makerpad in its first acquisition

Intuit confirms $12B deal to buy Mailchimp

More TechCrunch

The deck included some redacted numbers, but there was still enough data to get a good picture.

Pitch Deck Teardown: Cloudsmith’s $15M Series A deck

The company is describing the event as “a chance to demo some ChatGPT and GPT-4 updates.”

OpenAI’s ChatGPT announcement: What we know so far

Unlike ChatGPT, Claude did not become a new App Store hit.

Anthropic’s Claude sees tepid reception on iOS compared with ChatGPT’s debut

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Look,…

Startups Weekly: Trouble in EV land and Peloton is circling the drain

Scarcely five months after its founding, hard tech startup Layup Parts has landed a $9 million round of financing led by Founders Fund to transform composites manufacturing. Lux Capital and Haystack…

Founders Fund leads financing of composites startup Layup Parts

AI startup Anthropic is changing its policies to allow minors to use its generative AI systems — in certain circumstances, at least.  Announced in a post on the company’s official…

Anthropic now lets kids use its AI tech — within limits

Zeekr’s market hype is noteworthy and may indicate that investors see value in the high-quality, low-price offerings of Chinese automakers.

The buzziest EV IPO of the year is a Chinese automaker

Venture capital has been hit hard by souring macroeconomic conditions over the past few years and it’s not yet clear how the market downturn affected VC fund performance. But recent…

VC fund performance is down sharply — but it may have already hit its lowest point

The person who claims to have 49 million Dell customer records told TechCrunch that he brute-forced an online company portal and scraped customer data, including physical addresses, directly from Dell’s…

Threat actor says he scraped 49M Dell customer addresses before the company found out

The social network has announced an updated version of its app that lets you offer feedback about its algorithmic feed so you can better customize it.

Bluesky now lets you personalize main Discover feed using new controls

Microsoft will launch its own mobile game store in July, the company announced at the Bloomberg Technology Summit on Thursday. Xbox president Sarah Bond shared that the company plans to…

Microsoft is launching its mobile game store in July

Smart ring maker Oura is launching two new features focused on heart health, the company announced on Friday. The first claims to help users get an idea of their cardiovascular…

Oura launches two new heart health features

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: OpenAI considers allowing AI porn

Garena is quietly developing new India-themed games even though Free Fire, its biggest title, has still not made a comeback to the country.

Garena is quietly making India-themed games even as Free Fire’s relaunch remains doubtful

The U.S.’ NHTSA has opened a fourth investigation into the Fisker Ocean SUV, spurred by multiple claims of “inadvertent Automatic Emergency Braking.”

Fisker Ocean faces fourth federal safety probe

CoreWeave has formally opened an office in London that will serve as its European headquarters and home to two new data centers.

CoreWeave, a $19B AI compute provider, opens European HQ in London with plans for 2 UK data centers

The Series C funding, which brings its total raise to around $95 million, will go toward mass production of the startup’s inaugural products

AI chip startup DEEPX secures $80M Series C at a $529M valuation 

A dust-up between Evolve Bank & Trust, Mercury and Synapse has led TabaPay to abandon its acquisition plans of troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse.

Infighting among fintech players has caused TabaPay to ‘pull out’ from buying bankrupt Synapse

The problem is not the media, but the message.

Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is disgusting

The Twitter for Android client was “a demo app that Google had created and gave to us,” says Particle co-founder and ex-Twitter employee Sara Beykpour.

Google built some of the first social apps for Android, including Twitter and others

WhatsApp is updating its mobile apps for a fresh and more streamlined look, while also introducing a new “darker dark mode,” the company announced on Thursday. The messaging app says…

WhatsApp’s latest update streamlines navigation and adds a ‘darker dark mode’

Plinky lets you solve the problem of saving and organizing links from anywhere with a focus on simplicity and customization.

Plinky is an app for you to collect and organize links easily

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: How to watch

For cancer patients, medicines administered in clinical trials can help save or extend lives. But despite thousands of trials in the United States each year, only 3% to 5% of…

Triomics raises $15M Series A to automate cancer clinical trials matching

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Tap, tap.…

Tesla drives Luminar lidar sales and Motional pauses robotaxi plans

The newly announced “Public Content Policy” will now join Reddit’s existing privacy policy and content policy to guide how Reddit’s data is being accessed and used by commercial entities and…

Reddit locks down its public data in new content policy, says use now requires a contract

Eva Ho plans to step away from her position as general partner at Fika Ventures, the Los Angeles-based seed firm she co-founded in 2016. Fika told LPs of Ho’s intention…

Fika Ventures co-founder Eva Ho will step back from the firm after its current fund is deployed

In a post on Werner Vogels’ personal blog, he details Distill, an open-source app he built to transcribe and summarize conference calls.

Amazon’s CTO built a meeting-summarizing app for some reason

Paris-based Mistral AI, a startup working on open source large language models — the building block for generative AI services — has been raising money at a $6 billion valuation,…

Sources: Mistral AI raising at a $6B valuation, SoftBank ‘not in’ but DST is

You can expect plenty of AI, but probably not a lot of hardware.

Google I/O 2024: What to expect