Today, we’re excited to announce our $14 million Series A round, led by Spark Capital and joined by existing investors including Torch Capital, South Park Commons, Infinity Ventures, Soma Capital, Dash Fund, and Altman Capital.
This brings our total raised to $20.25 million and will enable us to accelerate our mission to make owning a business easier than having a job.
Read more on TechCrunch and BetaKit.
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The Founding Story
Business ownership is all I’ve ever known.
It started with a lemonade stand, and continued as a teenager - selling websites to local businesses. I paid for my university running a window cleaning business. I somehow parlayed that into building and selling a consumer software business.
It wasn’t easy. Along the way there were hundreds of failures, countless sleepless nights, and years of self-doubt.
The entrepreneurship journey is not for the faint of heart. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Business ownership is the only path to freedom.
Making your own money changes your life and mindset. It builds resilience. It forces you to think about the world in a different way. It gives you agency.
No one wants to spend their entire life working for someone else and making their boss rich. Most of the world agrees.
Entrepreneurship is growing incredibly fast in the US, and new business registrations in Europe and India are at a 7 year high. There are almost 1 billion small businesses worldwide, and they make up a significant portion of many nation’s economies.
Tens of millions of people every year turn a dream of being their own boss into a side hustle, then a full-time business, and never look back.
Despite the growth - demand for owning a business far outmatches supply. Nearly 80% of Americans want to start a business, but only 20% follow through.
The ones that do make the leap are met with immense challenges at every stage of the journey. Why?
The user experience of business ownership is broken.
Beyond being really great at the work, to succeed in business requires you to become an expert in dozens of other things.
Marketing. Web design. Accounting. Financial planning. Taxes.
Customer support. Employee management. Payroll. Sales.
The only current solutions are Googling your way through it, buying “marketing for dummies,” paying 100k+ for a franchise, or learning through mistakes.
We glorify the pain of entrepreneurship. It’s like “chewing glass and staring into the abyss.”
No wonder the failure rate of new businesses is so high.
But why can’t it be easy?
For service business owners in particular, the economic unit of value is their skills and experience. The business part shouldn’t be that complicated. Or that hard.
Imagine owning a business was easier than having a job.
Last year, we made it 100x faster to launch a business website.
We launched our first product 12 months ago - the Durable AI Website Builder.
We took a painful and expensive process for every business owner, and enabled them to get it done on their phone in a Starbucks drive-through lineup.
The response has been incredible.
Over 6 million websites have been created, and we’ve been blown away by the range of businesses built with Durable. We’ve learned a lot from our customers.
Every business starts with a website, but a website is just the beginning.
With AI, every business process can now be rethought from the ground up. And most of those processes are broken.
We’ve since launched additional tools like an AI-powered CRM, invoicing, and marketing automation - all tied together with the Durable AI Assistant.
We are building a global platform for entrepreneurship - where anyone with a skill can create a successful business in minutes.
We envision a world where every business owner will have access to an expert AI-powered CMO, COO, and designer - working for them 24/7.
Where your business runs on auto-pilot, constantly optimising marketing, pricing, scheduling, and operations.
Where all of the core functions - business formation, bank account, insurance, marketing automation, tax and accounting, recruiting, payroll, and more - are solved in a few clicks.
Where we can find the right business for someone to start, and reverse engineer a plan that guarantees success.
If we succeed in our mission, the barriers to entry for entrepreneurship will disappear, and self-employment will become the default option.
It’s an ambitious vision.
Luckily, we’ve found a few amazing investors who share it.
We’re excited to announce that we have raised $14m in Series A financing from Spark Capital with participation from Torch Capital, South Park Commons, Infinity Ventures, Dash Fund, Altman Capital, Soma Capital, and more.
We are grateful for the support from our customers, our investors, and our team.
Now, back to work.
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