GrowthPoint Acted as Exclusive Financial Advisor to Bookipi on its Investment by Ten13 and OIFVC

Bookipi is a mobile application for invoicing, expenses, and payroll.

Sydney, Australia – TEN13 has completed its latest investment into Bookipi. Bookipi’s mission is to build the cleanest, easiest to use bookkeeping software and we’re excited to co-lead their investment with Our Innovation Fund.

As a university student, founder Tim Lee ran his own tiling business and hired and managed up to 10 staff. He experienced first hand the issues that small businesses face around invoicing and expensing, managing receipts and chasing up customers for payment.

This was the inspiration for Tim to solve this problem for other small business owners like himself and lead to the creation of Bookipi.

We were introduced to Tim through our friends at GrowthPoint Partners and after getting to know Tim and what he was working on, we are super excited to supercharge his vision of empowering small businesses with the simplest and most easy-to-use bookkeeping software on the market.

Problem:

SMEs represent a material part of the global economy. According to the OECD, they represent 99% of businesses and 50–60% of the value created around the world. SMEs are known to lack digital adoption at the same pace as larger enterprises due to sophistication and technical skills. This is particularly the case in the business world when dealing with paying your early employees, keeping your books up to date, chasing up cash on your sent invoices etc.

A consistent challenge with starting or running an SME can be three-fold.

Solution:

Enter Bookipi — they have developed three core applications that target each of these finance-related problems faced by small businesses. These are mobile-first applications (on both the Apple and Play Stores), that target these core bookkeeping problem areas for SMEs and micro-business.

• Invoicing (Bookipi Invoice) to seamlessly invoice, allow payment and easily chase outstanding invoices;
• Expenses (Bookipi Expense) to manage cashflow and understand the flow of money between income and expenses against budgets; and
• Payroll (Payroller) to pay and manage your employees in a simple fashion.

Market Size:

The global accounting software market size is projected to increase to US$19bn by 2025. Whilst established players exist, like Xero, SAP, Oracle, Intuit and Quickbooks, Bookipi has managed to carve out market share and usage despite competition in the cloud software by going after the growing freelancers and micro-business category. The company estimates that in the US alone, there could be ~30m potential customers.

With such a huge pain point for small businesses and a large market, it is unsurprising that there is a lot of competition from industry incumbents, as well as a long-tail of free bookkeeping applications on both the Apple and Play stores. Bookipi has some distinguishing features which we believe will enable them to execute on the big opportunity ahead of them in the small and micro business accounting software space:

Customers Love Them: In such a crowded market as invoicing, expensing and payroll applications, user feedback and reviews matter. Bookipi’s customer ratings (across thousands of reviews) range from 4.7–4.9 out of 5.0 in both the Play and Apple app stores. This is great external validation for their product and trumps established competitors across the board. Having recently launched with Huawei into the Chinese market, we look forward to seeing more strong feedback in another market from their expanding user base.

Capital Efficiency: Tim has bootstrapped this business (no external funding) and proven to be incredibly capital efficient in building out Bookipi to date. They have managed to build a simple suite of products with hundreds of thousands of users without any external capital. This instils us with confidence that our additional capital will provide the fire-power needed to expand their team and ramp up execution on their vision.

Product-led Playbook: We are big fans of product-led companies. We have seen Clipchamp, Drawboard and Chipper Cash scale to millions of users by investing heavily in their product and allowing virality, strong positioning through organic web search (Clipchamp) and in-app stores (Drawboard and Chipper Cash) to help drive growth. We think Bookipi has a similar opportunity within the growing freelancer & small business sector.

Post-investment, Tim has been joined by Chad Hardy as COO, who will bolster the commercial arm of the business with everything partnerships, growth, operations and customers.

We are looking forward to supporting Tim, Chad and the Bookipi team as they continue to build beautiful, seamless accounting software.

This post was originally published on www.medium.com. View press release here.