In its first-ever fundraise, Troy software startup Inspect Point said Thursday that it has raised $28 million.
The funding comes from Mainsail Partners in the form of growth equity, a form of private capital typically for relatively mature companies that are looking to grow.
Mainsail Partners says it invests exclusively in fast-growing, bootstrapped software companies. The firm has offices in San Francisco and Austin, Texas. David Farsai, a partner at Mainsail Partners, is joining the board as part of the deal.
Padraic Doyle, CEO and co-founder of Inspect Point, said that the company continues to receive cold-call emails daily from investors seeking to deploy capital. The startup is proud to have been fully bootstrapped to this point, but after ignoring those messages for a while, Doyle said Inspect Point decided it was time to reconsider.
“We have this niche market, fire-life safety. There's a lot of investment going into the market in general. The market's growing. The competition is growing,” Doyle said.
“We just realized there's so much stuff we want to do, so much stuff we wanted to build, and we were growing so fast. I like to say it's like we're playing a video game on the hardest difficulty level, being bootstrapped. There's so much more we can do and focus on if we raise money with the right partner."
Founded in 2014, Inspect Point’s software allows fire protection companies to manage building inspections, proposals, invoices, service tickets and more through a cloud-based application. The startup has customer companies of various sizes throughout North, Central and South America. It is available in English, Spanish and Canadian French.
The fire inspection industry tends to move slowly regarding utilizing new technology, but it got a big boom in business when the pandemic hit because fire inspections needed to continue even though people were working remotely.
Inspect Point was among Albany Inno’s list of Startups to Watch in 2022.
Doyle said the company plans to use the $28 million to expand each of its divisions, particularly sales and marketing.
Unlike with traditional venture fundraising, Inspect Point won't be expected to pursue another round of investment. Since the company is already profitable, Doyle thinks Inspect Point will be able to achieve what it wants with the $28 million alone.
"We can take some risks we weren't able to take before,” he said. “Before, we had to sign on X amount of customers before we could afford to hire the next person. Now we can hire the people ahead of time to build our growth, both from a product standpoint and a customer standpoint."
Doyle said the company plans to double revenue as well as the number of clients and workers in 2022. Two new people are already set to start work this Monday.
Inspect Point said it doubled its seven-figure revenue and added hundreds of new clients in 2021. The startup currently has more than 30 workers.
