In a round led by Franklin Templeton, business payments innovator Bill.com has raised $88 million in new funding. The investment, which also featured participation from Mastercard, Fidelity Canada, FLEETCOR, Tamasek, and others, takes Bill.com’s total funding to $275 million, and gives the company a valuation of more than $1 billion.
“Bill.com is changing how payments are made in the SMB market by defining an industry leading payment and software platform for SMBs,” company founder and CEO René Lacerte said. “Businesses struggle with conventional payment processes which are complex, manual, paper-based and not always secure. Our cloud payment platform is changing all that. We automate payments and back office business processes resulting in significant efficiencies and cost savings.”
In addition to the funding announcement, Bill.com revealed that it has teamed up with fellow Finovate alum Mastercard to offer its virtual cards as part of Bill.com’s automated AP solution for SMEs. The move is part of Bill.com’s effort to further digitize the payment process, leveraging virtual card technology to make funds more readily available to cardholders and to ensure accurate matches between payments and receivables.
Mastercard Small Business Lead for North America Ginger Siegel highlighted the advantages of virtual cards, and praised the collaboration with Bill.com as a way to increase adoption of the technology. “Virtual cards are more secure and provide transparency into cash in-flows and out-flows, which is critical to the growth of all small businesses,” Siegel said. “With the partnership with Bill.com, we can bring the benefits of virtual cards to hundreds of thousands of smaller enterprises in the United States.”
Bill.com demonstrated the Cashview feature of its platform at FinovateSpring 2012. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, the company made fintech headlines recently when it announced that it was ending wire transfer fees for small businesses using its International Payments technology. Earlier this year, Bill.com announced a partnership with American Express to offer a new solution to streamline vendor payments, Vendor Pay.
Founded in 2006, Bill.com manages $60+ billion in annual payment volume in its three million member network, and includes more than 70 of the top 100 accounting firms in the U.S. among its clients. Bill.com is also partnered with major accounting software providers like QuickBooks and Xero, and is the preferred digital payment solutions provider for CPA.com.
StreetShares will market the credit card to the 2.5 million veteran-owned small businesses in the U.S., a niche population the Virginia-based company considers to be underserved. StreetShares anticipates that adding a credit card to their suite of offerings will provide a tool for business owners to finance and pay for everyday expenses.
