Dougs, a French accounting startup, has been round since 2015. It already generates $16.4 million (€15 million) in annual recurring income. And it’s a bootstrapped firm, which means that it hasn’t opened its capital and raised any funding from VC corporations. But now, the corporate has determined to boost its first founding spherical.
Dougs raised $27 million (€25 million) from Expedition Growth Capital, a British VC agency that’s looking for investment opportunities in bootstrapped firms which have reached a sure degree of maturity. And Dougs appears to suit the invoice fairly effectively as the corporate has 14,000 shoppers and is already worthwhile.
At its core, Dougs is a web-based chartered accountant service for small and medium firms. It handles your monetary statements and generates licensed tax filings. Behind the scenes, Dougs works with chartered accountants, authorized consultants, HR professionals, and so forth. But the corporate has additionally designed its personal accounting utility to enhance the connection between the Dougs workforce and its shoppers.
In explicit, shoppers can join Dougs with their financial institution accounts in order that the accounting platform can robotically fetch transactions. From the shopper portal, shoppers can add paperwork, receipts and extra. Dougs may deal with expense studies and invoices, which signifies that you should utilize Dougs to get an outline of your organization’s income — previous, current and future.
Additionally, Dougs can facilitate the incorporation course of. It may also be used for your organization’s payroll. Dougs additionally supplies authorized recommendation when wanted. In different phrases, the startup handles all the same old duties that will be dealt with by an accountant.
There are 250 folks working for Dougs. With at this time’s funding spherical, the corporate expects to succeed in the following degree by doubling the scale of its workforce by 2025. Up subsequent, the startup plans to increase to new international locations, comparable to Germany and the U.Okay.
Dougs competes with different on-line chartered accountant providers, comparable to Keobiz, Livli, Wity, and so forth. Some tech firms like Pennylane are taking a special strategy as they work with present accounting corporations to make them swap from a legacy accounting software program answer to a contemporary software-as-a-service platform.
But there’s room for many firms on this house as accounting corporations stay extraordinarily fragmented in France. Existing accounting corporations working with old skool accounting functions stay the default possibility for many small and medium firms.
