Toronto’s Wave Accounting Secures $12 Million in Series B Funding

Today, Toronto-based startup Wave Accounting, a free cloud-based accounting software platform designed specifically for small businesses and solo entrepreneurs, announced that they have secured $12 million (USD) in Series B funding from the Social+Capital Partnership, a Palo Alto-based investor group aimed at turning venture capital into a socially progressive and constructive force that creates progress on a global scale, with participation from existing investors Charles River Ventures and OMERS Ventures.

“The new funding will help us achieve our aggressive plans to improve upon our two existing products, Wave Accounting and Wave Payroll,” says Rob Maurin, Vice President of Community, Content and Communications at Wave Accounting. “It’s also the gas in the tank that we need to drive hard into new markets and to grow our service internationally,”

One of the new investors/partners from Social+Capital that Wave Accounting will be working closely with is ex-Facebook VP Chamath Palihapitiya. Here’s an overview of Palihapitiya’s vision for the Social+Capital venture via TechCrunch. Mamoon Hamid, General Partner at Social+Capital, will also be joining Wave’s board.

The benefit of using the Wave application is that it offers easy accounting with unlimited invoicing, expense tracking, reporting, personal finance, multi-user/multi-business access and more—all of which is 100% free.

In exchange for free accounting software, Wave sells advertising targeted to their small business and entrepreneurial customer base. “We don’t currently have any traditional ad units on our site. Our existing display ads are all unobtrusive and contextually relevant,” says Maurin. “We aim to provide value to our customers by attracting the best offers from relevant advertisers.”

To date, more than 250,000 small businesses have signed up for Wave in more than 200 countries around the world. In its first year alone, Wave boasts that it eliminated 1,173,712 minutes of manual data entry—saving small business owners time and money. Techvibes will be watching to see how Wave Accounting grows as a result of this new round of funding.