Popular expense report startup Expensify has introduced invoicing and billing clients from inside its cloud-based dashboard, the company said today.

Expensify was founded in May 2008 with the promise of offering “expense reports that don’t suck.” It’s main mission is to make the expense report and reimbursement process easier for companies with relatively simple web, iOS, and Android apps. The company has attracted 1.4 million users from more than 200,000 companies to date.

Expensify CEO David Barrett told VentureBeat that this is a “major milestone” for the company because it is the first time it has launched a feature not directly related to expense reporting.

The new feature will compete directly with Freshbooks and Bill.com, two companies known for cloud-based billing. What makes the new feature so handy is that Expensify users can now take expense reports you have created or been submitted to you and can re-bill them as an invoice to clients.

If clients already use Expensify, payment options for invoices and bills are the same as the ones offered for expense reports, including ACH Direct Deposit, PayPal, and even Bitcoin.

“Expensify’s addition of invoicing and bill processing might seem odd to an outsider,” Barrett said via email. “But inside the industry, we’re all jockeying for advantage in a bigger long-term game: becoming the next Intuit.”

San Francisco-based Expensify has raised $6.7 million in funding from investors including Hillsven Capital, Baseline Ventures, SV Angel, and Travis Kalanick.

Image via Expensify

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

How tough are cell phone bills to read? So tough that AT&T is creating custom videos to help its subcribers understand them.

Automatically generated, the new video bills give subscribers narrated line-by-line tours of their monthly bills, simplifying things like one-time charges (which people tend to be the most confused by) and other bill items.

AT&T has offered the feature to more of its customers over the past few weeks, and aims to have it everywhere by early next year. According to AT&T VP John Donovan, people seem to like it so far.

While the idea is well-intentioned, wouldn’t the smarter (and probably cheaper) idea have been to simply make the bills themselves easier to understand?  If AT&T’s bills are so confusing that they need videos to explain then, then it’s clear that the bills are too complicated to begin with. Either that or the average AT&T subscriber is really, really dumb.

In any case, its likely that rival carriers are now hustling to announcing similar systems, so don’t expect this sort of thing to go away any time soon.

Billtrust, a company that delivers bills via e-mail, website, or even fax or paper, collected a big pile of the other kind of bills today: It has raised a $25 million second round of funding from Bain Capital, giving it a warchest for acquisitions of other companies as it seeks to increase market share and revenues.

I’m pretty sure that a lot of cigars are being lit today, and not with $20 bills.

The series B brings total investment in Billtrust to $30 million. The previous round of $5 million came from Edison Ventures more than five years ago. Since that time, Billtrust has grown tenfold — not a bad return on investment.

“As the world quickly moves from paper to electronic billing, there is incredible opportunity for an enterprise-focused service provider with the right balance of technology and customer-facing methodology to be a leader in this space,” said Matt Harris, a managing partner at Bain, in a canned statement. Harris will be joining the startup’s board.

Billtrust’s customers are large companies that need to send bills to their customers. The chief executive, Flint Lane, founded the company in 2001. It is based in Hamilton, New Jersey.

Photo credit: kenteegardin via photopin

JustFab will send you a to-die-for clutch and blouse for $40 a month, and The Fancy will Fedex just about anything that its members like for $30. And yes, men can get a “sockscription” from smart socks manufacturer BlackSocks.com, or for under $10 the Dollar Rubber Club can even deliver a monthly pack of condoms straight to your door, every 30 days.

But the recurring revenue stream has been around for long before Basecamp and online project management, the Wall Street Journal’s paywall, or even the local newspaper that your daddy paid $5/month for.

But news is where the subscription model seems to have started, with newspapers and periodicals, way back in 1440.

Aria Systems, the cloud-based subscription billing management company, compiled a short history of the recurring revenue model, from Spotify and Netflix to telephone service back in the 1800s, and all the way back to newspapers and periodicals back in the 1400s … four years after Johannes Gutenberg started working on his printing press in Mainz, Germany.

Here’s the infographic:

photo credit: Great Beyond via photopin cc

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Behind every cloud, there’s  … a cloud. Cloud services may not always be saving you money.

Irish startup CloudVertical monitors how its 2,500 customers use Amazon web services, VMWare, and Heroku. “Looking across our user base, ” says CEO Ed Byrne, “from companies spending less than $50,000 a year to those spending millions, people are only using about 30 percent of the resources they pay for. This is really remarkable, considering that for the past decade, the sales pitch for virtualization has been ‘physical servers only get about 30 percent usage.’”

In a recent Google survey, 58 percent of 800 CFOs said they believe that cloud computing reduces IT costs, while a whopping 96 percent agreed that “cloud computing provides their business with quantifiable benefits.” Admittedly, Google included services like Gmail and Google apps in its definition of cloud services, which may have skewed the results to some degree.

Byrne explains that the key to using cloud services efficiently is the ratio between the total computing power paid for vs. power used, the catchily titled Cloud Usage Efficiency Metric. “The cloud is not pay-as-you-go but pay-as-you-provision. People still fire up lots of servers and leave them there,” explains Byrne. “Companies need to monitor three things — capacity, usage, and cost. We help people answer the questions of who is doing what, with what resources, at what usage, and at what cost.”

CloudVertical provides KPIs (Key performance indicators) for the cloud. Byrne previously ran a cloud provider. Customers were always telling him that they were going to switch to Amazon because it was cheaper but could never tell him exactly what Amazon’s pricing was. He says that there is still a lack of transparency and accountability when it comes to cloud usage. That’s the problem CloudVertical sets out to solve.

The company tracks cloud cost on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, predicts future cost, and benchmarks your usage against other companies. Amazon, VMWare, and Heroku are currently tracked.

CloudVertical’s customer is “the guy who cares about the cost”, whether that is a developer who is using the company credit card for a new project or the CFO of a larger enterprise. Most often compared to Cloudability, Byrne insists that CloudVertical’s real competitors are enterprise tools like IBM’s Tivoli or HP OpenView.

Cloud Vertical has received over $1 million in funding from Irish VC Delta Partners and Enterprise Ireland. The company is based in Dublin and has seven employees.

Note: Byrne is a common name in Ireland so Ed Byrne is no relation of mine (as far as I know).

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mobile operators across the globe lost more than $58 billion last year because of deficient billing systems, according to a new study from Juniper Research.

As carriers now support a wider array of devices than ever before, including iPhones, Android devices, BlackBerrys, and Windows Phones, and manage a crazy amount of traffic from these devices, the billing systems carriers use can’t keep up. With so many people with devices in hand and so many ways to process transactions, the scale of loss for operators has increased because there’s a much greater opportunity for fraudulent activity and bad debt.

“The systems in place now can’t identify accurately how this traffic is being processed,” study co-author Windsor Holden told VentureBeat.

The $58 billion in revenue lost last year equals out to more than 6 percent of the industry’s total revenue. Under a “nightmare scenario” presented by the report, in which operators fail to implement any serious reforms during the next five years, the losses could rise as much as five times by 2016.

So what can carriers do to help remedy this problem? Juniper says they need to implement automated system solutions to “minimize the outflows resulting from next-generation connectivity.” Carriers also need to create a single repository of data to better track customer activity and integrate applications that can better track data on devices. With key investments, the report says that leakage will decline to 4 percent of revenue in 2016 from today’s 6 percent.

Holden suggests that as the mobile industry moves aggressively to deploy 4G LTE networks, carriers risk undermining revenue from value-added services by not investing in solutions to track data in real-time. However, regardless of how many reforms are put in place, revenue leakages will almost certainly continue to be higher in Africa and the Middle East more so that the rest of the world.

“In emerging markets, the emphasis has been on rapid expansion and not on things like preventing leakage,” Holden said.

Money burning image: bioraven/Shutterstock

VentureBeat is holding its second annual MobileSummit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of themobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Carrier payments — the ability to make mobile purchases that get charged directly to your cellular bill — are convenient for consumers, but for many merchants they can be a raw deal thanks to the big revenue bite carriers often take from purchases.

Ebay aims to change that paradigm and make carrier payments a viable option for many more merchants. Today eBay CEO John Donahoe announced the PayPal Carrier Payment Network at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which will help instill standards for carrier payments across different mobile operators.

PayPal mobile vice president David Marcus explained what the network aims to do on the company’s blog:

The initiative will require that carriers revise standards to help optimize user experience, increase flexibility of carrier payments as a payment method, and increase payout rates for merchants, allowing carrier payments to address the entire digital goods industry, which is expected to grow to $220 billion by 2014 according to Juniper Research.

The Carrier Payment Network is part of the multi-pronged approach PayPal and its parent company eBay are taking with mobile payments. In an interview with VentureBeat at the Mobile World Congress, Marcus also reiterated PayPal’s plans to roll out mobile payments to all Home Depot stores (over 2,000 locations) within the next few months, following a trial run in a few select stores.

Be it carrier payments, or simply picking up that much-needed chainsaw at Home Depot, eBay and PayPal want to be in on the mobile payments action. The companies today also announced two new mobile payment partnerships with Yotel, a company that offers temporary sleep pods for travelers, and Entradas, Spain’s top ticketing company.

Image via Liz Wize/Flickr

VentureBeat is holding its second annual Mobile Summit this April 2-3 in Sausalito, Calif. The invitation-only event will debate the five key business and technology challenges facing the mobile industry today, and participants — 180 mobile executives, investors, and policymakers — will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. You can find out more at our Mobile Summit site.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The country’s largest wireless carrier, Verizon, will begin charging its subscribers a $2 “convenience fee” to pay their bills.

The only way to avoid this fee is to sign up for automatic payments through Verizon’s website, according to a report from Droid-Life. The new fee will go into effect beginning Jan. 15, 2012. Verizon’s actions follow the same policy Sprint implemented earlier this year to get more people signed up for automatic payments.

Verizon subscribers have every right to be nervous about setting up an automatic payment agreement — especially now that the company has shifted from unlimited data usage subscription plans to capped/metered data usage plans. Last year, the company admitted that it had overcharged 15 million customers for unnecessary data usage, netting the company an estimated $90 million in fees.

More than that, it’s ridiculous to consider paying a bill a “convenience”. I can understand why Verizon would want to charge people for paying bills over the phone, since it requires additional labor costs. However, this new policy implies that the act of allowing you to pay your bill when it’s due isn’t a convenience, it’s a necessary cost of doing business.

The reason Verizon and other carriers can get away with this type of practice has to do with the lack of competition in the wireless market. It wouldn’t work in other markets. Imagine if your local grocery store decided to implement a fee for walking in the door, using a shopping cart and ringing up all of your items. You’d go somewhere else.

I hope federal regulators are paying attention to this type of behavior when assessing Verizon’s recent deal with big cable companies to expand its wireless business.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Doxo, a startup that wants to end the pain of paper billing, is bringing its service to smartphones today with the launch of its iPhone app.

The Seattle startup already provides its customers with a website where they can store and pay their bills. Now those users will be able to do the same thing on their phones — or, at least, they can check on their bills, and Doxo says it will add the bill pay functionality soon. It seems like a natural way to take care of your bills in short bursts throughout the day, similar to how Mint.com’s iPhone app has become one of the main ways I check on my personal finances.

The iPhone app (as well as future apps for Android and other phones) opens up some new use cases, said co-founder and chief executive Steve Shivers. One obvious example: People can now take photos of their bills from their phones and upload them to the app. Shivers added that many of the companies and organizations that Doxo serves aren’t going to build mobile apps, and if they did their customers wouldn’t download them — so Doxo becomes the only way for those companies to reach customers on their phones.

Since Doxo’s launch, we’ve seen the launch of a similar service from Hearst called Manilla (it launched at the DEMO conference co-produced by VentureBeat, and it ended its closed beta testing period yesterday).

When I asked how he sees the competition, Shivers argued that it’s a question of “What’s your priority?” Doxo is focused entirely on its bill management service, while Manilla is part of an aging media company, Shivers said. He also noted that Manilla uses “screen scraping”, where a service logs in to another website and pulls data on a user’s behalf. Doxo, on the other hand, partners with the different companies sending bills (and charges them a fee), a model that Shivers said is more sustainable.

Doxo’s investors include Sigma Partners, Bezos Expeditions, and Mohr Davidow Ventures.

Today, however, co-founder and chief executive Steve Shivers gave me a demo of the service. And the site is now handing out invites and letting in users.

Shivers and his team tried to answer this question: If so many of us are Web-savvy, why haven’t we gone completely paperless? Shivers said 55 percent of US households pay some of their bills online, but only 15 percent of them have gotten rid of paper completely. The gap between the two numbers includes people who still pay some of their bills the old-fashioned way, as well as people who still receive their bills and other messages in the mail, even if they pay online.

There are a couple of problems with the current way of doing things, Shivers said. Customers have to go to separate websites for each bill, and it’s an impossible headache to log in to 15 or 20 different accounts each month.

Doxo should help push users towards a state of complete paperlessness. It offers an online dashboard for managing each account where you need to pay bills. Users will be able to upload their bills (whether they downloaded it from the company website or scan a copy they received in the mail) and store their login name and password for each account. That way, they’ll have all of their billing information in one place. Then, if the billing company decides to create an account with Doxo, they can send you your bills via the Doxo website, and they can send other messages, such as a revised privacy policy.

All of the documents belong to you, Shivers said. Doxo can’t sell the data to anyone else, and you can download each bill whenever you want.

The approach sounds a little like Mint, the popular Intuit-acquired personal finance service. They both bring multiple accounts together and make the data easy to understand. At the same time, by focusing on bills, not financial institutions, Doxo is tackling a different problem. Plus, it has a different business model — instead of making money when it convinces users to sign up for different accounts or credit cards, Doxo will charge businesses, since they’re saving money by not sending paper bills. Businesses supposedly spend $30 billion a year to mail 50 billion bills to customers.

One question right now is whether the service can be useful even if the companies sending you bills haven’t signed up with Doxo. Shivers predicted that the experience will vary from user to user. Some will be fine just using Doxo as a repository for bills and account data. Others will find that a number of the businesses they need to pay are in Doxo already. And yes, there will be a group that doesn’t get much use out of the site right away, but they might sign up for the companies whose bills they want to pay, and then they’ll receive notifications as businesses join.

There are some shortcomings right now — mainly the fact that you can’t make payments on the Doxo site. Doxo just gives you the bill, hands you over to the billing site, then you can mark the bill as paid in Doxo once you’re done. But Shivers said Doxo is definitely looking to add in-site payment features, mobile features, and more.

• PEAK Surgical takes in $21M for electrosurgical tools (release)
• CellGate acquired by Australian cancer biotech ProGen for $2.5M (release)
• Traversa raises $2M for RNAi-delivery technologies (release)
• RemitDATA, Web-based healthcare-service co., takes in $5.5M (bizjournals.com)
• Spinal-implant maker Archus Orthopedics gets $10M venture loan (release)
• Promedior pulls down another $5.5M for fibrotic disease (release)
• Acrongenomics takes 11 percent stake in Molecular Vision (release)
• Hepatitis drug-developer Biolex withdraws IPO (IPO Home)
• Employee drug screener eScreen gets Carlyle investment (release)
• NovaMin raises $2.5M for dental-care products (VentureWire)
• Cardious receives $1.5M for heart-valve repair (VW)
• PE-backed Spire Healthcare buys PE-backed Classic Hospitals for £145M (FT)
• Aberdare Ventures promotes two principals to partner (release)

CellGate acquired by Australian cancer biotech ProGen for $2.5M –CellGate, a Redwood City, Calif., biotech working on new cancer drugs, sold itself to ProGen, an Australian biotech also focused on cancer, for the equivalent of about $2.5 million. The release is here. Needless to say, this represents a fire sale for a biotech that seems to have run out of time.

CellGate was pursuing drugs that aimed to shut down the growth of cancer cells either by inhibiting polyamine or by “turning down” the activity of cancer-related genes. ProGen will conduct an 18-month assessment of CellGate’s first drug candidate, a polyamine inhibitor that had already completed an early stage, phase I clinical trial, before deciding upon a mid-stage, phase II program. ProGen will also evaluate a stable of CellGate’s preclinical drug candidates.

ProGen will issue shares worth $1.5 million for CellGate’s assets, and will assume net liabilities of roughly another $1 million. The sale represents a significant loss for CellGate’s investors, including Healthcare ventures and New Enterprise Associates, who as recently as 2002 put $10 million into the company in a fourth funding round. I haven’t been able to piece together how much CellGate raised over its lifetime, although it’s certainly considerably more than that $10 million.

Traversa raises $2M for RNAi-delivery technologies – Traversa Therapeutics, a La Jolla, Calif., biotech working on ways to deliver RNA-based drugs to their cellular targets, raised $2 million in a first financing round. Investors included San Diego Tech Coast Angels, Mesa Verde Venture Partners and Morningside Group.

Traversa’s work is intimately involved with RNA interference, a newly discovered technique for “silencing” disease-related genes using short strands of RNA that trigger a natural cellular mechanism for shutting down genes. Getting those short RNA molecules into cells in the first place, however, isn’t particularly easy.

Traversa claims to have solved that problem, although it doesn’t appear to be saying how. The company will license its RNA-delivery approach to drug companies, and also offers it for use as a drug-screening technology.

RemitDATA, Web-based healthcare-service co., takes in $5M – Memphis, Tenn.-based RemitDATA, a provider of Web-based healthcare-data services, raised $5 million in a new funding round.Noro-Moseley Partners and SSM Partners provided the funding.

RemitDATA offers Web-based tools for individual physician practices designed to help them track insurance and Medicare reimbursements and scan paper records into digital form. The company also makes a sales-management tool for the homecare industry.

Promedior pulls down another $5.5M for fibrotic disease – Promedior, a Malvern, Pa., biotech focused on fibrotic disease, raised an additional $5.5 million as an extension to its first funding round. Polaris Venture Partners, Morgenthaler Ventures, HealthCare Ventures and Easton Capital participated in the financing.

Fibrotic disease is a general name for conditions that entail repeated bouts of inflammation followed by scarring that, over time, can lead to organ failure. Examples include heart failure, cirrhosis and kidney failure. Promedior aims to develop drugs that can slow or reverse the scarring process, and intends to begin clinical trials of its first drug candidate this year. The company previously raised $7 million in its first funding round.

Acrongenomics takes 11 percent stake in Molecular Vision – Acrongenomics, a Swiss company that acquires and develops life-sciences technology, took a 10.5 percent stake in Molecular Vision, a developer of credit-card sized diagnostic devices. Acrongenomics had previously announced its intent to acquire Molecular Vision, so presumably this is the first step in that plan. The release is here.

Hepatitis drug-developer Biolex withdraws IPO – Biolex Therapeutics, a Pittsboro, N.C., biotech developing ways to manufacture protein drugs in an aquatic-plant system, withdrew its planned $70 million IPO. We previously covered Biolex and its IPO dreams here.

NovaMin raises $2.5M for dental-care products – NovaMin, an Alachua, Fla., company working on tooth-remineralization products, raised $2.5 million in a third round of funding and expects another $2.5 million, VentureWire reports. Intersouth Partners provided the financing.

Cardious aims at $1.5M for heart-valve repair – Cardious, a Northfield, Minn., medical-device company working on a heart-valve bypass device, is raising $1.5 million in a first funding round, VentureWire reports. The company aims to raise the funds from angel investors. Cardious is developing an aortic-valve replacement that can be put in place on a beating heart, rerouting blood flow around the damaged valve.