Sequoia Capital has led a second round of funding for Outright, provider of a free and drop-dead simple online bookkeeping service, investing $5 million in the fledgling company together with returning backers First Round Capital, Shasta Ventures and SoftTech VC.
Outright (formerly called GoBootstrap) launched its online bookkeeping app in public beta earlier this year after raising $2 million in seed funding from undisclosed angel investors and the VC firms that have now joined this second financing round alongside Sequoia.
Outright wants to make it easier for small businesses and self-employed individuals to keep track all of their income and expenses in order to get their taxes done accurately (it was designed for the United States tax system).
The service is currently free to all customers and will remain so, although the company aims to introduce a number of paid options and fee-based services at some point in the future.
(Via peHUB)
Makes sense. Sequoia can scan the online records and invest in companies that do well
Looks like Mint.com
“If Apple did accounting apps…”
Have a look at http://www.xero.com. I’ve been using it for a while and they are about to launch a personal edition. I hate bookeeping and accounting but Xero has made me actually enjoy.
They deserve it. We have been using outright for a while and it is a great tool for start ups. Compared to the free version of Quickbooks, Outright blows it out of the water.
It will be interesting to see if Sequoia has backed the wrong horse in this race when http://www.xero.com comes to the US. They have a very strong product.
Congrats, Bill W. & the Outright team! Great product!
Yes, right like Mint.com
the next target of Google, either by acquistion or copying. gives users another reason to visit Google website
That’s awesome! We demoed our integration with Outright at the last TC50 (Outright uses our API to import expenses straight from 94% of US credit cards) and it’s been a huge success ever since. Congrats Kevin, Paul, and the rest of the team!
-david
We’ve been using Outright since the launch. The product was good then, and it’s steadily gotten better. There’s a lot of potential in this area for innovative functionality.
Eric
I love using Outright but cannot voice my frustration loudly enough that they do not have an iPhone app yet!
Hopefully they put this money to good use and come out with one ASAP, otherwise I will be forced to jump ship in 2010 to the first alternative bookeeping app I can find that offers some form of mobile accessibility.
Chris, you’re spot on. One of the biggest things we’ll get from the additional funds is the ability to do more things simultaneously. iPhone app is on the radar, it’s just a question of sequencing.
Would love a better idea of what you’d like to see specifically – can you email Bill (our head of product) and/or I? Email addresses are both first name at outright.com.
Cheers,
- Kevin
This seems like an obvious attempt to get acquired by Intuit. Intuit already has an online version of QuickBooks but the guys at Outright probably want to disrupt the small business bookkeeping market by offering this for free. The fee based option will probably never see the light of day since the founders/VCs probably hope to be acquired by then. This will be one of those acquisitions where the large company buys the small company not because they are truly interested in the product but mostly so they go away.
Seems promising but inadequate. A basic and vital part of any small business operation, especially the freelance market they seem geared towards, is the ability to generate invoices. It should be part of any accounting program. But they don’t have it, instead they refer you to Freshbooks, where you have to pay a monthly fee for the service (unless you only have 3 clients).
If I am going to pay a fee, and then navigate two services, I might as well stick with Quickbooks or one of the other alternatives.