The boot pilot backed by Jeff Bezos achieves a valuation of $ 1.2 billion

Startup Accountant raised a new round of funding from Jeff Bezos and other Silicon Valley investors to help small businesses outsource back-office work.

The San Francisco-based company closed a $ 100 million round of financing this week, doubling its valuation to $ 1.2 billion. The round was led by Bezos Expeditions venture capital firm Bezos and 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 internships at Amazon sixteen years ago before setting up two more companies. One was bought by Oracle, the other by Dropbox. He compared the use case of Pilot to a problem solved by Amazon Web Services: allowing developers to focus on creating a business rather than figuring out how to host a website.

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

The pilot’s employees, mostly former accountants, are assigned to work directly with a small business. They take on administrative tasks such as payroll, accounting, taxes and invoices. The start-up has partnered with companies such as American Express, Bill.com, Gusto and Stripe. Daher describes it as “technology compatible,” but Pilot is not a software company. The company makes money with subscription fees.

Pilot revenues doubled during the pandemic, although small businesses suffered the brunt of Covid-related shutdowns. The company’s revenue has tripled about every year since it was founded in 2017, Daher said.

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

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

Pilot is Daher’s third company, with co-founders Jeff Arnold, general manager of Pilot, and Jessica McKellar, technical director of the company. The group met as college students at MIT at the computer club.

Index Ventures partner Mark Goldberg, a first-time Pilot investor, first met the founding group at Dropbox nearly a decade ago. While the Silicon Valley narrative is “focused on using software to optimize everything,” Goldberg said Pilot is adopting the “opposite method” by adding people back to the mix.

“No one creates a company to deal with BS in the back office. You want someone to extract that pain point,” Goldberg said. “People don’t want software, they want peace of mind.”