Fintech Decimal used this planned presentation to raise $9 million from seed round

Entrepreneurship / June 9, 2022 / DRPhillF / 0

There is no shortage of expense management, billing, and payroll tech solutions for small and medium businesses.
Decimal is a financial technology that automates the accounting processes of small and medium businesses.
Watch the presentation of the decimal chart used to raise $9 million from an initial round.

Small and medium-sized businesses can count on any number of payroll, expense management, bill payment, and card startups promising companies to automate parts of their financial workflow.

Small businesses have embraced this corporate financial program en masse, fueling growth throughout the pandemic for relatively new entrants like Ramp and industry-huge companies like Intuit.

But it is not easy to connect all these tools in one seamless process. And while accounting processes may be far from where many startup founders want to focus their time, having effective back-end finances means freeing up time — and capital — to spend elsewhere.

For Matt Tait, Decimal’s CEO, there’s plenty of opportunity in the “boring things you have to do to survive as a company,” he told Insider.

Launched in 2020, Decimal provides a back-end technology layer that small and medium-sized businesses can use to integrate accounting and business management software tools into one place.

On Wednesday, Decimal announced a $9 million fundraising round led by Minneapolis-based Arthur Ventures, along with Service Providers Capital and other angel investors.

Decimal’s automated accounting process product supports the startup’s partnerships with major business-focused technology companies, from Intuit to Expensify, Bill.com, Gusto, and Shopify.

“To run the accounting processes for a small project, you need somewhere between five to 15 different software products,” Tate said. He added that while these tools are essential for “point solutions,” they also add up to “noise” and can create chaotic workflows and difficulties in connecting different systems and data sets.

According to Tait, Decimal has been booted – and profitable – since its launch two years ago. While Tait is headquartered in Indianapolis, the startup’s 60 employees are fully working remotely across 13 states (including one who was recently hired in the US Virgin Islands).

“We like to be a remote-only company, because that means we can hire anywhere,” Tate said.

Decimal has spent less on marketing over the past two years as it has grown. But Tate said that in the wake of the decimal fundraising system he is now in a position to intentionally burn more money. The startup now plans to focus on growing its sales and marketing teams, and is targeting a return to profitability within the next 15 months.

Since its launch, Decimal has found attraction among three groups of clients: professional service firms, such as marketing and consulting firms; Technology startups and e-commerce players. Typically clients have annual revenues ranging from $500,000 to $12 million, Tate said.

Early-stage tech companies, in particular, proved to be fertile ground for decathlon.

“We always joke that the hardest customer on board is the post-Series A tech customer,” Tate said. “They’ve pivoted six or seven times. They can’t afford to lose the revenue they took, but they need to expand and they don’t want to spend any time on this infrastructure.”

Tate added that he does not see the decimal system moving further in terms of average customer size, but plans to push the startup to meet the needs of larger companies that are particularly facing new office problems as they grow.

“Once you start hiring more, getting more clients, and making more expenses, your margin of error and what your intuition says about how your business is doing increases exponentially,” Tate said.