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Digits launches a free expense monitoring dashboard for small businesses, closes on $22M Series B

Digits, a fintech startup hailing from the same team that built and sold Crashlytics to Twitter, is officially launching today after two years of development. It’s also announcing a $22 million Series B round of funding led by GV, as it makes its public debut.

While the company had been fairly quiet about product details while in stealth mode, it’s today unveiling its first product: a visual, machine learning-powered expense monitoring dashboard aimed at startups and small businesses.

The dashboard, called Digits for Expenses, helps business owners track how their company is spending money, by showing things like spend by category, by identifying vendors and recurring expenses and by offering real-time alerts, among other features.

Instead of requiring business owners to make a switch from their existing financial solutions, Digits connects with the accounting software, banks, payroll providers, financial packages, sources of revenue and credit cards the business already uses — like Xero, QuickBooks, NetSuite, Citi, Bank of America or Chase, for example.

At launch, the list includes more than 9,000 banks, with support for Xero and NetSuite coming soon.

After setup, Digits will then automatically analyze the company’s spend and visualize it, in real time.

While visualizations of data may be reminiscent of personal finance startup Mint, Digits’ web-based solution is more technical in nature and offers an expanded analysis of the data on hand. Plus, as a business solution, it has to offer features like security, permissioning and collaborative workflows, which results in a more sophisticated product.

Digits also uses machine learning technology to predictively categorize transactions as they happen and the software can alert users to anomalies — like suspicious activity or unexpectedly large transactions — in real time. Business owners can use the dashboard to find out things like how quickly expenses are growing, what the cash flow looks like, where costs can be trimmed, what services are being paid for on a recurring basis and more, and can search for transactions.

The software also supports the ability to comment on transactions, loop in a colleague to ask for clarification about a charge and upload missing receipts. Everything uses HTTPS along with TLS and certificates so data is encrypted between Digit’s services and at rest.

The original idea for Digits came from a problem that co-founders Wayne Chang and Jeff Seibert faced themselves when building Crashlytics. As they explained previously, their focus as entrepreneurs was on solving technical challenges, not on the operational side of running a business.

Many entrepreneurs also find themselves in this same space. They’re trying to solve a problem or crack a tough engineering puzzle, but instead have to redirect their time and resources to spreadsheets, financial reports, transaction records and other paperwork required to actually run the business.

“Startups and small businesses today simply don’t have the resources to manage their finances internally. Most of them still settle for spreadsheets, and the lucky ones work on an hourly basis with external accountants,” explains Seibert. “As a result, their accounting itself is seen as a cost-center, and they pay for little beyond the basic monthly financial statements — Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, etc. By the time those statements are delivered — weeks after the end of each month — they’re already out of date,” he said.

That means things businesses need — like updates, one-off reports and new budgets — can require additional costs and longer wait times, so they get skipped.

The COVID-19 pandemic has put even more pressure on small businesses, many of which are now struggling to even survive. As a result, Digits has decided to launch the product for free to those who sign up — not a free trial, but actually free. It plans to later charge for additional products and paid upgrades to support its own business.

Digits is able to make this offer because of its now-expanded venture funding.

Already, the company had raised $10.5 million in Series A funding in a round led by Benchmark. That round had included a sizable 72 angel investors as well, including founders and CEOs from companies like Box, GitHub, Tinder, Twitch, StitchFix, SoFi and several others — entrepreneurs with an understanding of the problems Digits is aiming to solve.

Today, Digits is announcing an additional $22 million led by Jessica Verrilli at GV,  who also now joins Digits’ board alongside Benchmark’s Peter Fenton. (Benchmark also participated in the new round).

“Jeff and Wayne are masterful at creating intuitive, high-utility products from complicated data,” said Verrilli about the GV investment. “I saw this up close with Crashlytics and Twitter, and I’m thrilled to partner with them on Digits as they reimagine financial software for startups,” she added.

The startup, now a team of 18 and hiring, was already offering its software solution to a group of customers ahead of today’s public launch, who effectively operated as beta testers allowing Digits to refine its product. Digits isn’t able to share its customer names, for the most part. However, it noted that Coda was one of early adopters and provided valuable feedback.

It also has over 10,000 companies who joined its waitlist over the past two years who are now being let in.

At the time of its Series A, Digits saw more than $1.5 billion in transaction value flowing across its production systems. That number has since grown to $8 billion.

The software is free starting today for U.S.-based small businesses. The company plans to add support for international markets later this year.

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Stealth fintech startup Digits raises $10.5 million Series A from Benchmark and others

Stealth fintech startup Digits, from the same team that built Crashlytics to scale then sold to Twitter for more than $100 million, has raised a $10.5 million round of Series A funding, the company is announcing today. The round was led by Benchmark and has the backing of 72 angels, including founders and CEOs from companies like Box, GitHub, Tinder, Twitch, StitchFix, SoFi and several others.

With the round, Digits also gains a new board member, Peter Fenton, who has served on the boards at AirTable, Twitter, NewRelic, Yelp and elsewhere.

The funding is a big bet on serial entrepreneurs Wayne Chang and Jeff Seibert, who launched and sold their crash reporting service to Twitter, which itself later sold it to Google. At Twitter, the team remained to build out the product and launch new services, like Answers. After the sale to Google four years later, it was then folded into Google’s own developer platform to become the crash reporting tool for Android. Today, it’s still on nearly 5 billion monthly active devices and used inside millions of apps.

Now, the Crashlytics co-founders have returned with most of their original team to develop a new fintech startup, Digits, which describes itself vaguely as “a counting company.”

The company’s focus aims to solve a problem the founders had faced themselves when building Crashlytics.

“As builders, there is nothing more exciting than cracking the next engineering puzzle; than perfecting the next design; than delivering the next capability to customers. And there is nothing more mind-numbing than the paperwork, and spreadsheets, and financial reports, and inscrutable transaction records that are all required to actually operate the business,” a Digits blog post earlier this year explained.

“Globally, most entrepreneurs today have no formal training in business finance. We certainly didn’t. Today, you start a company to solve a real problem for real people, or to offer a service you’re skilled at, or to provide a living for you and your family. You don’t start a company because you want to operate a business—but you have to anyway,” the founders said.

While Digits isn’t talking about the specifics of its new product yet, its software is described as pairing design and machine learning in order to “democratize financial savvy.”

More specifically, it leverages APIs, classification algorithms and machine learning techniques to provide a real-time view into a business’ finances, proactively alert you to what’s important and allow you to deep dive into your data to better understand what’s driving your business.

The company believes its approach to visualizing a company’s finances is unique, and apparently a sizable number of investors agree.

Among the 70+ angels backing Digits are Box CEO Aaron Levie; Adam Bain and Dick Costolo (ex COO and CEO of Twitter); Ali Rowghani (partner at Y Combinator, ex-COO Pixar); SoFi CEO Anthony Noto; Drift CEO David Cancel; AngelList board member Jeff Fagnan; Justin Kan (CEO Atrium, co-founder Twitch, YC partner); StitchFix CEO Katrina Lake; GitHub CEO Nat Friedman; First Republic Bank COO Mike Selfridge; Desktop Metal CEO Ric Fulop; Tinder co-founder Jonathan Badeen; DraftKings CEO Jason Robins; LegalZoom co-founder Brian Lee; Gusto CEO Josh Reeves; and Notazie CEO Pat Kinsel. 

Though Digits hasn’t publicly launched — the product is in invite-only status for now — it already has live customers and is seeing more than $1.5 billion in transactions processing on its platform, the company says.

And unlike Crashlytics, which was based in Boston, Digits is a 100% remote operation. LinkedIn shows just 10 employees, including co-founders Chang and Seibert.

The team hasn’t said when Digits itself will be publicly unveiled or opened to sign-ups.

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Twitter Adds Friend-Finding And Two-Step Authentication To Its Login Service Digits

digits_find_friends_launch Twitter’s Digits, a developer-facing service launched last fall that offers a way to integrate a simpler, password-free login option into third-party mobile applications, has been expanded today with a pair of new features, including a friend finding function and two-step verification. While already Digits was offering a more secure way for users to log into apps by using their phone… Read More

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Twitter Launches Digits, A New Way To Sign In To Apps Without Using Passwords

Screen Shot 2014-10-22 at 2.04.14 PM Today, Twitter announced the launch of a new service called Digits, aimed at application developers looking for a simpler, password-free login option for their mobile applications. The news was revealed this afternoon at Twitter’s first annual developer conference called Flight, which served not only as the launchpad for a suite of tools aimed at mobile application developers, but… Read More

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