The start-up pilot supported by Jeff Bezos has a valuation of 1.2 billion dollars

The accounting start-up pilot has raised a new round of funding from Jeff Bezos and other Silicon Valley investors to help small businesses outsource back-office tasks.

The San Francisco-based company closed a $ 100 million round of financing this week, doubling its valuation to $ 1.2 billion. The round was led by venture capital firm Bezos Expeditions and hedge fund Whale Rock Capital, with the participation of Sequoia and Index Ventures. Stripe and its founders, Patrick and John Collison, as well as former VMware CEO Diane Greene, had previously invested in Pilot.

Its co-founder and CEO, Waseem Daher, was interned at Amazon 16 years ago before setting up two other companies. One was bought by Oracle, the other by Dropbox. He compared the use of the Pilot to a problem solved by Amazon Web Services: let the developers focus on building a business instead of figuring out how to host a website.

“There are all these annoying, boring, scary and important things you have to do as a small business owner,” Daher told CNBC. “Owners should focus on running a large-scale company, and Pilot should do the back office things for you.”

The pilot’s employees – mostly former accountants – are assigned to work directly with a small business. They take on administrative tasks such as payroll, accounting, taxes and invoices. The start-up has collaborated with companies such as American Express, Bill.com, Gusto and Stripe. Daher describes it as “compatible with technology”, but Pilot itself is not a software company. The company earns money from subscription fees.

The pilot’s revenue nearly doubled during the pandemic, despite small businesses enduring the hardships of Covid-related closures. The company’s revenue has tripled about every year since its inception in 2017, Daher said.

He attributed the recent rise to awareness of automation as people run their companies at home. Many millennials are also starting small businesses and tend to be more open to outsourcing through a technology platform, Daher said.

“People want to do this practically. They don’t want to have to go down Main Street with the receipt box and visit the accounting office,” he said.

Pilot is Daher’s third company, along with co-founders Jeff Arnold, COO of Pilot and Jessica McKellar, the company’s CTO. The group met as MIT students in the computer club.

Index Ventures partner Mark Goldberg, an early investor in Pilot, first met the founding group at Dropbox almost a decade ago. While the Silicon Valley narrative is now “focused on using software to optimize for everything,” Goldberg said Pilot takes the “opposite approach” by adding people back into the mix.

“No one starts a company that handles BS in the back office. You want someone to extract that pain point,” Goldberg said. “People don’t want software, they want peace of mind.”