Outright raises $2M for dead simple finance software

February 9, 2009 | Anthony Ha | Comments |

Outright, a company that offers simple web software to help small businesses manage their finances, has raised $2 million in a first round of venture funding.

Chief executive Kevin Reeth gave me a demo last July, back when the company was called Bootstrap, and I was impressed by the way he’d been “absolutely ruthless in simplifying and paring things down.” Services include tracking sales and business expenses, organizing your business records for taxes, and reminding you to pay your estimated taxes on time. The Campbell, Calif. company is also making the data you upload to Outright available to other business tools via application programming interfaces (APIs), starting by integrating with FreshBooks to track your invoices.

Outright’s software is free for now, but Reeth plans to start charging for a premium version.

The company isn’t giving many specific numbers on user growth, but Reeth says customers have entered data about around $100 million in transactions so far. Meanwhile, Compete shows that traffic to the original GoBootstrap.com site made a huge jump in January. Reeth attributes the jump to the tax season, as well as the New Year spurring businesses to want to get their act together.

So why the name change? Reeth says one of the big problems was the fact that the company couldn’t get the Bootstrap.com website (in fact, I mistakenly linked to that website in my first post). The other issue is that “bootstrap” is a well-known term in the tech community, but is a bit more obscure among the less tech-savvy businesses that the company targets.

The round was led by First Round Capital and Shasta Ventures, with participation from SoftTechVC and undisclosed angel investors. TechCrunch first reported the funding.

Competitors include NetBooks the online version of Intuit’s QuickBooks.

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • Want more simple software? Time59 (www.time59.com) is for solo professionals who bill by the hour for their services. Time and Expense tracking, Invoicing and Accounts Receivable.
  • I don't know what it is about outright.com, but it looks and feels like a scam. Whereas mint.com looks legit. I'm not saying outright.com is a scam, I'm just saying...something about it looks like one of those spam websites. It reminds me of something like:
    https://rushpayday.com/
  • Well, having seen demos of the software and spoken to people I trust who use it, I can say for certain that this is definitely not a scam. You seem to be equating "relatively plain website design" with "spam."
  • Converting the free users to the premium version could be a problem, as the Free version could be sufficient enough for many.
  • With free user accounts, it is relatively easy to reach 100 million in transaction. You never know if users are entering "actual" transactions or if they are just trying out the accounting software. For example, our demo account gets to 1 million every week. Of course, sometimes that would be in Indian Rupees :P
  • ahtivas
    for more accounting software, visit numia.biz, which is a free online accounting software. hope this may help for someone.