NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Wave (waveapps.com) has closed a $10 million Series C investment with participation from CRV, The Social+Capital Partnership, OMERS Ventures, and a strategic investor in the global fintech software space. This brings total investment in Wave to $35 million, with the new funds earmarked for ongoing innovation and development of small business financial tools.

Wave is the fastest-growing small business financial solution on the market today.

Key stats:

• Wave is signing up 10,000+ businesses per week, all through organic channels.
• 95% of businesses in North America have 0-9 employees. That’s 30 million businesses.
• Wave’s integrated products include accounting, invoicing, payments, payroll, receipt scanning and personal finance.
• Wave’s customers are currently invoicing more than $6 billion per year.
• Wave signs up nearly 5,000 merchant accounts (payment processing) each month.
• Wave’s payroll customers are currently running nearly $250 million in payroll per year.
• Wave is tracking $60 billion in income and expenses for its customers.

“We are huge believers in Wave’s vision of addressing the full breadth of small business finance needs,” says Devdutt Yellurkar, Partner at CRV. “Over the past 3 years, Wave has attracted over 1,000,000 small businesses to its seamlessly integrated accounting, invoicing and payroll system and continues to grow its customer base very fast.”

“Wave has quietly built the most comprehensive finance software in the cloud for microbusinesses,” says Mamoon Hamid, General Partner at Social+Capital. “We agree with Wave, that small owner-operated businesses are different from the ‘SMBs’ and ‘SMEs’ targeted by traditional players, and we believe Wave is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this massively underserved market.”

“With the support of CRV, Social+Capital and OMERS Ventures, we can complete our vision of building a truly disruptive suite of tools for owners of small- and micro-businesses,” says Kirk Simpson, CEO and co-founder of Wave. “Our strategy goes beyond solving a singular need: We’re taking the fear and pain out of all aspects of financial management, and helping our customers grow healthy, profitable businesses.”

Financial Technology Partners (FT Partners) served as exclusive financial and strategic advisor to Wave in this transaction.