Steve Baxter’s TEN13 backed a $1.6m seed round in a book-keeping startup set to be the next Xero

Freelancer and solo entrepreneur accounting platform Bookipi has raised $1.6 million in a seed round co-led by Sydney VC Our Innovation Fund and Steve Baxter’s investment syndicate TEN13.

Bookipi, founded in 2017, is targeting the freelancer and micro SME sector with its book-keeping platform and already has a user base of more than 640,000 customers – a third of Xero’s customer base – in more than 150 countries, with 40% of users coming from the US.

The startup has two core products: an invoice generator ‘Bookipi Invoice,’ and payroll application ‘Payroller.’ The invoicing app is already generating $12 billion of invoices annually, while Payroller, launched less than 12 months ago, is already on target to process more than $4 billion in payroll.

The company has less than five employees

Bookipi founder Tim Lee said the partnership with TEN13 and OIF “adds incredible strategic expertise and value” to expanding the product range and global growth.

“The funds will be used to further grow our team and development resources and continue to build out our product suite. We couldn’t be more excited about the journey ahead,” he said.

TEN13 partner Stew Glynn partner said Bookipi is one of a rare breed of startups to bootstrap their business to global scale.

“We attribute a lot of this success to Tim’s capability as a founder as well and the hunger from SME’s to have the tools to run their businesses through digitally enabled processes,” he said.

We raise funds deal by deal at TEN13, and the demand for this investment amongst our members is a big endorsement for Tim and his vision in creating a globally scalable suite of book-keeping tools.”

OIF co-founder and General Partner Jerry Stesel, whose VC firm has backed fintechs such as ZipMoney, Pocketbook and Earnd, said freelancers and micro-businesses are the biggest global employment market.

“Now more than ever these businesses need the best designed and easiest to use tools to power their daily work. In Bookipi, we see just that,” he said.

“The impressive growth achieved all without raising any capital to date, provides strong validation of the market need for these applications.”