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Copilot, a platform aimed at helping companies including marketing agencies, accounting firms and law firms run and grow their businesses, today announced it has raised $10 million in a $100 million Series A funding round led by YC Continuity and Lachy Groom. – Financial consideration. Co-founder and CEO Marlon Misra said the funding will be used to expand the CoPilot team, particularly through the engineering and product organization, to build a “Shopify-like” app store specifically for services businesses.
“While the first two years are focused on building a large core product, future years will focus on building our platform,” Misra told TechCrunch in an email interview, adding that Copilot has raised $13 million in capital so far. “Thousands of technology-enabled service businesses including marketing agencies, financial services firms, consulting firms, law firms and a variety of startups operate on Copilot.”
Misra co-founded Copilot with Neil Raina in early 2020. Before starting the company, the pair went through Y Combinator and worked on several other startup ideas, including Piccolo, a token-based home “vision assistant.”
“Due to several company building experiences, our team became clients of dozens of service businesses – marketing agencies, accounting firms, immigration firms, recruitment agencies and others,” Misra explained. “Those experiences helped us identify a critical problem that almost all service businesses face. In particular, service businesses struggle to provide a streamlined user experience for customers because they generally lack the technical expertise to build their own customer-facing product.
Using Copilot for Billing Payments. Image Credits: Pilot
With Copilot, businesses can set up a customer portal, which allows customers to send messages, make payments, sign contracts, and access custom apps. Companies Get a choice between using Copilot’s in-house applications or integrating with a pre-paid Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product.
This solves a problem many companies face, Misra explained, when they try to use a mix of software-as-a-service tools that don’t work together seamlessly — fragmenting the customer’s user experience. “Customers generally don’t have a way to manage their accounts and easily access important information.” He added. “Instead, customers receive email notifications from the various SaaS tools used by the services business… We’ve found that when companies switch to Copilot and ‘incubate’ their business, they see higher customer satisfaction, improved retention, new growth channels and greater efficiency.
Misra notes that Copilot competes with several vendors in different — but somewhat related — industries. For example, he sees Competitors Bill.com and Freshbooks (in the payments space), but also Box and Cash (in file sharing), DocuSign and HelloSign (in contracts), JotForm and Typeform (in forms), and Intercom and Zendesk (in help desks).
When asked if he expected a challenge for the 15-employee Copilot business, Misra said he would not and pointed to Copilot’s large customer base. He declined to answer questions about earnings, but volunteered that the co-pilot has more than four years on the runway.
When the pandemic first started, the most immediate impact was companies closing their physical offices and investing more in online presence, online customer acquisition and new software. Many companies have tried to reinvent themselves as online-first businesses, which is why there is now a huge trend towards building these online, modern, customer-centric and highly automated businesses. Misra said. “The economic slowdown that has succeeded the pandemic has exacerbated the need to be efficient. And here, we see companies again looking for more ways to automate and strengthen their software stack. It will help us,” he said.
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