Mobile Invoicing App Invoice2go Raises $35M, Former eHarmony Exec Greg Waldorf Joins As CEO

Anthony Ha for TechCrunch writes: More than a decade after it was founded, Invoice2go is announcing that it has raised $35 million in its first round of external funding.

The round, a Series A, was led by Accel Partners and Ribbit Capital, with Accel partner Ryan Sweeney joining Invoice2go’s board of directors. In addition, Accel CEO-in-Residence Greg Waldorf has joined Invoice2go as, yes, its new CEO.

The company sells invoicing apps that work on mobile phones, tablets, and desktop/laptop computers. Waldorf will actually be based in Palo Alto, where the Australian company has opened an office. He said the Silicon Valley team will focus on growth and marketing (though not exclusively), while the product and engineering teams remain in Sydney, where they’ll continue to be led by Invoice2go founder Chris Strode.

Waldorf noted that joining a company as chief executive was the likely outcome of his CEO-in-Residence role, which was not an investing position and basically gave him “an elongated time horizon to find the right role.”

He’s currently sitting on the board of Accel-backed real estate company Trulia, and he previously spent five years as the CEO of dating site eHarmony. Moving into invoicing doesn’t seem like an obvious next step, but he told me he’s particularly interested in building paid subscription businesses: “There is nothing as difficult, but also satisfying, as getting a customer or an end user to be willing to pay for software.”

Nonetheless, Waldorf admitted that there was “a little bit of an evolution” in his outlook. He used to consider invoicing to be “a subset of accounting” (and therefore mostly useful for taxes and bookkeeping), but over time he realized that it was crucial to a small business’ cashflow — so Invoice2go could save businesses time and help them get paid more quickly.

The company says it’s now used by more than 100,000 businesses in more than 50 countries, with customers invoicing $10 billion annually. Looking ahead, Waldorf said he hopes to continue the company’s international growth, particularly in English-speaking countries, by doing more to localize the product and to adapt the workflow to different geographies.

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Aussie startup moves to Palo Alto, hires ex-eHarmony CEO and raises $35M

Cromwell Schubarth for San Jose Business Journal writes: Australian mobile B2B startup Invoice2Go's first venture round is a big one, in more ways than one.

The 10-year-old Sydney company founded by Chris Strode raised $35 million from Accel Partners and Ribbit Capital, moved its headquarters to downtown Palo Alto and hired former eHarmony CEO Greg Waldorfto run the business.

"This is a really cool opportunity to get involved with a company that already has a lot of product-market fit," Waldorf told me. "It already has 100,000 paid subscribers around the world."

Invoice2Go helps small business owners on-the-go such as electricians, painters, consultants and freelancers to create invoices, track expenses and manage their company from their smartphone or tablet. It is being used to send $50 million in invoices every day and is a top-rated app on the Apples's App Store.

"For Accel it is a chance to get in on a product that we know people love, but it was really just a product and engineering organization until now," Waldorf said. "This growth capital allows us to hire more people and really think about getting users much more rapidly through paid outreach and making the product even better than it is."

One of the challenges is to deal with the various laws countries around the world have about billing and collection. "It can really be quite different," Waldorf said.

Waldorf was a CEO-in-Residence at Accel when he was hired back in April, but the news was kept under wraps until now. He began staffing up the office over the summer and the company has 45 people between the two locations now.

"The idea is that Sydney is going to grow quite significantly on product and engineering — we might double or triple the team there over the next 12 months — and here we will have a very significant marketing and sales effort," Waldorf said.

Invoice2Go founder Strode will run the engineering and product development side of the business from Sydney.

Waldorf was CEO at eHarmony from 2006 until 2011, when he left to join Accel. He is on the boards of a number of companies, includng Trulia, Grovo, View the Space, and VivaReal. He is a Stanford graduate, serving as a founding member of its Graduate School of Business Management Board and is also on the Board of Overseers of Hoover Institution.