Pilot Closes $60M Series C from Sequoia: What Comes Next

We’re excited to announce that we’ve just closed a $60M Series C fundraising round led by Sequoia Capital. Including previous investments from Index Ventures and Stripe, this puts Pilot at a total of $120m in funding raised.

When we founded Pilot four years ago, Jessica, Jeff, and I wanted to solve a problem we’d faced ourselves at our previous startups: managing the back office is both really important and really painful for every business owner out there. Tending to our bookkeeping, taxes, R&D credits, and budgets was a costly distraction from running our actual business—but one we couldn’t ignore. We started Pilot to solve this problem for business owners everywhere, freeing them to focus on the actual reason they started their business in the first place.

With Pilot’s unique “people + software” approach, it’s now easier than ever for founders and business owners to focus on growing their business, instead of worrying about the administrative overhead. We’ve taken capabilities that were previously only available to large enterprises with dedicated finance and administrative teams, like financial strategy from experienced CFOs and monthly spending variance analysis, and made them accessible to startups and SMBs. And we’ve done it for over 1000 companies, across a broad range of verticals.

Basically: we want to give every business big-company superpowers. Or, in the words of our newest investor, Pat Grady at Sequoia, we’re ”doing for the back office what AWS did for computing – making it easy, scalable, and on demand.”

So what comes next? The short version is, we make a good thing even better, for even more businesses than ever before.

When we first started, we just did bookkeeping – one of the most time-consuming yet essential back office responsibilities. Over the past year, we’ve increased our capabilities to help our customers go farther and do more. Need advice on which metrics you should be tracking and how to improve your numbers? Now Pilot can help with that. Interested in the R&D tax credit, but don’t have the resources or know-how to tackle the documentation and claims process? Now Pilot can help with that too. Looking for help on how to understand your books? Pilot can always help with that.

With our Series C funding, we’ll be able to offer even more superpowers to businesses like yours. We’ll also be able to scale further, so that we can help more SMBs focus on reaching their full potential. Stay tuned—exciting things are ahead.

Finally, I want to say thank you: to our customers, to our amazing team, and to everyone who has helped Pilot grow from a dream to an industry gold standard. We couldn’t have done it without you, and we’re so very excited to have you along for the next stage.