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Venture Capital News: BackOps Closes $7M in Series A

2013-07-11
SAN FRANCISCO, CA, Back office as a subscription service platform, announced it has closed $7 million in Series A funding.
BackOps, a back office as a subscription service platform, announced it has closed $7 million in Series A funding, raising capital from both existing and new investors. The new funds will allow the company -- the fastest-growing managed service provider for back offices -- to continue rapid expansion of its revolutionary platform that allows small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to cost-effectively operate their enterprises.

The Series A round of funding is co-led by Sherpa Ventures and e.ventures and includes Google Ventures, with participation from existing seed investors including CrunchFund and Mark Pincus. This investment brings BackOps' total funding to nearly $9 million.

Concurrent with the funding news, Tim Whipple has joined BackOps as Vice President of Customer Success. Whipple is well known in the technology industry for his role in growing the LiveOps community of 20,000+ remote workers throughout the U.S. He will manage all aspects of BackOps' distributed workforce and help scale the workforce to help meet BackOps' aggressive growth goals.

The BackOps platform combines proprietary automated software and a highly educated stay-at-home workforce to allow companies to focus on running their businesses rather than their accounting, human resources and financial reporting systems. The subscription model frees companies from buying software and hiring employees and allows executives to focus on growing their businesses in a drama-free environment. Initially serving technology startups, BackOps is rapidly expanding into the medical and nonprofit fields.

'BackOps, our first investment from the Sherpa Ventures Fund, unlocks the same 'rent vs. buy' economies Scott and I saw in our early investments in Uber,' said Shervin Pishevar, Co-founder of Sherpa Ventures. 'Kristen, Mark, and their experienced team have developed a powerful software platform that delivers a world-class back office solution to SMBs through enabling and empowering a distributed workforce of highly educated and professional women to deliver their expert services directly to companies that need them the most. We believe BackOps is going to be a defining company in the sharing economy space and we are excited about helping fuel its incredible growth.'

'Kristen and the BackOps team have built a company that is riding two Internet trends -- the disruption of high-friction businesses, and the sharing economy,' said Blake Byers, partner at Google Ventures. 'It's a perfect relationship between business owners who can now focus their time and energy on their customers, and stay-at-home professionals who welcome the opportunity to use their skill set.'

The BackOps business model is based on the premise that educated women shouldn't have to choose between caring for their young children and maintaining their professional identity. Through its software platform, BackOps enables a new option: professional women can work from home while their children are in school and keep their skillset current. BackOps crowdsources and harnesses this enormous pool of educated mothers -- known as 'Riveters' -- and matches its SMB clients' needs with Riveters' capabilities.

'We're convinced that BackOps' extremely forward-thinking, low-cost business model will become the standard as an SMB back office platform, so it was a clear choice to co-lead this round of funding,' said Mathias Schilling, Managing Partner at e.ventures, and early investor in and board member of both Angie's List and AppFolio.

BackOps integrates proprietary, cloud-based automation software with dashboards that provide customers with real-time information at their fingertips to ensure all back-office operations run efficiently. The platform completely automates accounting, HR and finance tasks and creates an all-in-one, paperless solution for small- to mid-sized businesses. It offers the service on a subscription basis, with monthly fees based on company size and specific back-office needs. BackOps' customers are typically live in three to eight business days, making the transition efficient and smooth for SMBs. Both BackOps' customers and its Riveter workforce are located across the country.

'It's exciting to be able to match the back office needs of hard-working entrepreneurs with the skills of highly educated moms, all while eliminating the inefficiencies manifested by traditional back office vendors who have incentives to stay inefficient,' said Kristen Koh Goldstein, BackOps' Co-founder and CEO. 'We're on a major growth trajectory and this investment will enable us to accelerate our growth.'

About BackOps

BackOps helps small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) eliminate the pain of running back-office operations. Its integrated, comprehensive solution combines state-of-the-art software with a crowdsourced legion of highly educated, skilled and qualified stay-at-home moms to offer an affordable, scalable, on-demand solution that saves time and money and improves business efficiencies. Designed for the needs of businesses without the time or budget to deal with multiple platforms or outsource back office operations piecemeal, BackOps offers a subscription model for managing the day-to-day accounting, HR, and financial reporting processes, connecting them seamlessly on an automated dashboard. Headquartered in San Francisco, BackOps was co-founded by Kristen Koh Goldstein, a former CRO, and Mark H. Goldstein, BackOps' Chairman and 10-time entrepreneur.
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