Paystack and Flutterwave Need To Study This Growth Model
Finding growth is hard for fintech companies. So, Stripe, a payment processor which invested in Paystack, a Lagos-based fintech, is putting money in a startup that helps small and medium scale companies to do their accounting jobs. Why not, if you lock those SMEs and synchronize their payments and accounting, you have a new revenue base. Flutterwave and Paystack may need to be looking at that trajectory as they expand.
The tech industry claims “software is eating the world” and, if that’s true, bookkeepers could be the next course. That will be case if startups like Pilot, which helps small businesses replace their accountants with an automated service, continues to get traction.
On Wednesday, Pilot announced it had raised a $40 million Series B funding round led by Index Ventures, and supported by online payments giant Stripe, which joined as a strategic investor. The startup also announced the launch of a new product called Pilot Tax, which is part of its larger ambitions to handle all of its clients back-end operations.
San Francisco-based Pilot, which launched in 2016, specializes in gathering all of the paperwork generated by a business—from sales to payroll to credit card transactions—and transferring it to commercial software like QuickBooks. This serves to move many mundane tasks off-site and, according to Pilot, allow business owners to focus on other aspects of their operations