Typically investors have been placing big bets on “hot” industries including IoT and AI. And rightly so — these are high-growth areas, driven by a constant stream of new innovations. However, economic uncertainty and ultra-high valuations in 2019 has tempered VC enthusiasm a bit.
Last year’s initial public offering (IPO) of Bill.com, considered among the most successful IPOs, shines a light on the momentum of more practical technology solutions in accounting and financial services.
BOCA client, FloQast, is further evidence of this growing trend among VCs.
Earlier this year, FloQast, an accounting solution that helps businesses close their month-end books faster and more accurately, announced $40 million in Series C funding, bringing its total equity raised to $93 million.
The announcement garnered plenty of media interest, including features in TechCrunch and other publications. The successful announcement underscores the company’s momentum and shows that more practical business applications and SaaS solutions are just as viable as some of the more traditional, “hot” industries.
FloQast CMO Wynn White says, “The media results, our extended team at BOCA Communications deliver, is bringing a new level of interest and awareness about FloQast and the accounting industry by mainstream media.”
While this significant investment indicates high interest in FloQast, it remains steadfast in its goal to eventually take the company public.
“We are building FloQast to be a standalone public company that provides increasingly greater value to accounting and finance teams and their leadership, and the funding we’re taking now is helping us do just that,” says Mike Whitmire, founder and CEO of FloQast. “We’ve been approached by potential acquirers, but taking FloQast public is our stated aim.”
Whitmire founded FloQast based on his experience as an accountant at both a “Big Four” accounting firm and the talent management company Cornerstone OnDemand, where he spent plenty of time in meetings assigning accounting tasks and consistently following up through completion as part of the typical month-end close process.
“This was an enormously tedious and inefficient process, wedded in decades-old processes,” he says. “I remember sitting back one day and thinking, ‘there must be a better way.'”
With that, FloQast was founded in 2013 with an aim to help businesses streamline what has traditionally been a manual, time-consuming process. The company wanted to reduce the time and hassle it takes to close financial books each month across multiple financial entities, while also significantly improving accuracy.
All of these years and investment rounds later, that mission has been a successful one. On average, FloQast customers reduce the time it takes to close each month by three days. The business also helps companies improve their audit-readiness, in some cases enabling them to reduce the time an audit takes and even reduce the fees they are charged.
Says Whitmire: “We give organizations the future of the month-end close, today.”