When Verivend raised a $2.7 million seed round in October 2021, CEO Rodney Reisdorf asked the investors if they would use the startup’s own payment process platform to send the funding.
As an entrepreneur, he saved time and money using Verivend’s software that automates the payment process. For the investors, it was an easy experience and they asked to use the platform for their other investments.
“We decided to really laser focus on being Venmo for private capital,” Reisdorf said. “We want faster, seamless, more secure (private capital transactions) to eliminate friction.”
Prior to that, the company was aiming to support a lot of industries but started narrowing the focus in Q1 2022.
And it seems to have paid off. By Q1 2023, the startup had grown customers year-over-year by 650% and grown in dollar volume of transactions by 450%. Since the business, founded in 2019, started processing transactions in 2020, it has done nearly half a billion dollars of transaction volume, according to Reisdorf.
Verivend is keeping a strategic focus in more ways than one. The business does not want to be an all-in-one platform, but instead specializes as a tech platform specifically and has a preferred network of service providers for work like legal that its platform users can use. Customers can also bring their own service providers on the platform as users.
That preferred network of service providers is also part of the startup’s three-fold go-to-market strategy. Verviend partners with these providers so there’s incentives for their customers to use its platform and vice versa. The company can also partner with these providers in different ways as it makes sense to do so, Reisdorf said.
The business also aims to add customers through direct sales (it has a team dedicated to this) and product-led growth, meaning people working in private equity who use Verivend and bring on other customers.
“Once someone has a good experience with it, they’re naturally choosing us for all different types of interactions,” he said.
Verivend, headquartered at 599 Delaware Ave., Buffalo, has raised a total of $3.3 million so far and expects to raise a funding round before the end of this year.
The company, which employs 10 full-time workers, focuses on being capital efficient. Part of that is designing its platform and operations so it’s effective and as self-service as possible.
“It not only is a benefit to us because we can scale really efficiently by increasing customers and activity on the platform without increasing headcount, but it’s also a major advantage to customers,” he said. “They can get started quickly and with little friction."
