Verivend brings an experienced team of professionals in Buffalo’s startup community toward the goal of building a market leader in the fin-tech industry.
The company has built a cloud-based platform for the management of business transactions, proposed as a highly secure and transparent way to do business.
Verivend is based in part on the experience of Aaron Santarosa, president of The Santarosa Group, and his family’s long history in logistics. The historical problems are numerous: physical paperwork or email chains that must be reconciled by both sides of a transaction, delaying payments and creating confusion and acrimony.
But for Santarosa companies, there are significant benefits to having a reputation for client responsiveness and strong financial performance. The ambiguity helps the bad actors at the expense of the good ones.
“We spent a lot of time on paperwork and a lot of time chasing money that needed reconciliation and other back office work,” he said. “I said, 'There are all these different ways of transferring money, why doesn’t one exist on a common platform for businesses?' ”
Santarosa connected with another co-founder – who declined to be named but has a long history working with successful tech firms in Buffalo – in 2019 to create Verivend, where business transactions are almost instantaneous and all sides of a deal have access to the documents involved.
They brought in Jonathan Ebel, who worked as a global engineering manager in Willis Towers Watson’s Liazon office before becoming one of ACV Auctions’ early employees in 2016. Ebel, who still owns his ACV shares, helped build many of ACV’s early products and manage its growing software teams.
He was recruited to Verivend in December 2019, where he has overseen development of the platform, with an emphasis on security in an industry where banking and business data routinely gets printed out and passed around or attached via unsecured emails.
“The way companies transact right now is literally giving each other their banking information through email or texting or writing it on a napkin – big companies that I’ve worked for do business this way,” he said. “We allow customers to lock down information so they can transact without worrying about giving it to their competitors.”
Some large billing companies make money by holding payments for five to seven days and earning interest on that money. Others require both sides of the transaction to be on the platform. Verivend sees an opportunity by reassembling the business model for ease-of-use and efficiency.
The startup found early traction within the Santarosa Group companies – which include Buffalo Fuel, SGS Recovery and JAGG Electrical – and has spread organically to the its network of brokers, customers and vendors.
The co-founding team believes it will quickly catch on and grow in trucking and logistics, where there is no competitor that offers a secure billing management platform. But it’s potential applications go beyond that.
Verivend recently hired Daniel Devlin as chief of sales. Devlin spent several years managing sales and business development for portfolio companies owned by local private equity firm Lorraine Capital before jumping for a few months in November 2020 to ACV Auctions. But he was looking to build something from the ground up.
After weighing a few opportunities at local startups, Devlin chose Verivend based on the pedigree and experience of the team.
He will now help construct a business development strategy that encompasses several industries as Verivend looks to quickly scale up this year. Early conversations, for instance, show that everything from legal to janitorial services are ripe for the solution.
“We are going to figure out what industries are underserved and how we’re going to target them,” Devlin said. “We know there is opportunity in places where there are cash flow issues or where their billing is very antiquated.”
Verivend has been bootstrapped so far but works with Launch NY and plans to engage investors to support its growth, now that it has a fully working product and a business model.
While fragments of its business model exist in targeted industries, they believe nobody has put together a secure, affordable and holistic billing solution. The team has had a front-row look at what it’s like building and managing big software businesses in Buffalo – they’re simply proposing to do it again.
