The Miami-based fintech startup is also launching a corporate charge card for SMBs
Finally, a Miami-based fintech startup on a mission to help small businesses automate their accounting and finance functions, announced today it has raised over $95 million in a Series A round.
The oversubscribed round, which includes equity and debt, was led by PeakSpan with participation from Active Capital, 500 FinTech and GTMfund. Participating investors include David Bohnett, founder of GeoCities, and Scott Weller, founder of SessionM. Previously, Finally raised over $3 million in seed funding. Clear Haven Capital provided the debt facility.
The new funding will go toward Finally’s launch of small business lending via a new corporate credit card as well as team growth.
Finally, formerly called Back Office, was founded in 2018 by three Dominicans — CEO Felix Rodriguez, COO Glennys Rodriguez, and Edwin Mejia, who heads Business Development — to help automate back office functions for SMBs. The name change is recent.
“We wanted to build a platform where a small business owner could finally get everything in one place — they don’t have to deal with all these tools and learn all this different software or sign up for all these vendors. That was the inspiration for the name change,” said Felix Rodriguez, in an interview with Refresh Miami.
Today, more than 1,000 businesses rely on Finally to give them better visibility and management over core finance and accounting activities. What’s more, in the past two years, Finally has experienced triple-digit growth, the company said. Today, the SaaS startup is managing nearly $2 billion in transactions.
“Finally is pioneering a new category at the intersection of several fintech trends – SMB digitization, accounting automation, B2B payments, embedded finance, to name a few. That’s why the work the team is doing to build a ‘do-it-for-me’ automated bookkeeping solution for SMBs is very exciting and compelling,” said Jack Freeman, Partner at PeakSpan Capital, a growth equity firm in New York City and Silicon Valley.
What’s next? Finally is launching a corporate charge card for small businesses. With this launch, with the help of an $85 million debt facility as part of the round, “our plans are to make over a billion dollars in credit available to small businesses, “ said Rodriguez, an engineer and serial entrepreneur.
It’s part of an expense-management platform that now opens up credit to SMBs as well as helps them close their books faster, he said. Businesses can connect their bank and credit accounts and get immediate visibility into how their company is doing. The more data points a business connects, the more insights they unlock. “We want to level the playing field, and give them access to great numbers so that they can become more lendable,” said Rodriguez, who grew up in a family of small business owners.
The team is now close to 100 people strong, up from just 12 people about 3 years ago. Finally is hiring for positions in business development, engineering, credit, product development and other roles.
About a quarter of the team members are living in South Florida; mostly based at the Brickell City Centre WeWork. Finally hopes to lease space for its own offices in one of the new office buildings going up nearby, Rodriguez said.
#MiamiTech has come a long way since the startup went through 500 Global’s accelerator in early 2019 (Batch 24). Everyone said stay in San Francisco but these co-founders returned to South Florida, said Rodriguez, who moved from New York to South Florida eight years ago..
“In the past year and a half, I’ve had so many meetings in Miami and everybody’s moving here… We always believed this place would be what it’s become and it’s great to see.”
Photo at top of post: from left, Finally co-founders Edwin Mejia, (Business Development), COO Glennys Rodriguez, and her husband, CEO Felix Rodriguez.
Follow Nancy Dahlberg on Twitter @ndahlberg and email her at [email protected]
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