Bean Professional Services Inc., a digital accounting platform, has emerged from stealth mode with $1.7 million in funding.
A 2022 graduate of accelerator TechStars LA, the Cleveland startup raised its funding from Matchstick Ventures, Far Out Ventures, Acadian Capital Ventures and angel investors Wayne Chang and Jeff Seibert, who are founders of AI accounting firm Digits, it said in a statement.
Branded simply as "Bean" (accountants sometimes are called "bean counters"), the company is a managed marketplace and workflow management platform for accounting services that match accountants with companies worldwide that need help on projects.
Likened to a dating website for accounting service providers and companies, Bean is aiming to change the view of the accounting industry as "stodgy, regimented and reliant on outdated technologies," said Anees Pretorius, Bean's co-founder and CEO, in a statement.
"Many accountants want to be entrepreneurial and chart their own career path, but the industry has never accommodated that," Pretorius said.
"This is why the country is facing a dire accounting shortage when we actually have an abundance of new graduates who excel at mathematics, critical thinking and analysis," he said.
Bean offers its market network and workflow management tools, such as billing and project management, as a subscription service to the accountants in its network.
Since its launch, Bean has completed more than 17,000 project hours for mostly high-growth technology companies with revenues between $50 million and $1 billion, the startup said.
"We see a huge opportunity to rethink how accountants and finance professionals work with CFOs and companies" on projects such as preparing regulatory filings, said Natty Zola, a partner at Matchstick Ventures, in a statement.
Bean requires its accountants to have at least three years of public accounting or private industry experience and admits only 4% of applicants to its network, the startup said.
Bean represents a growing business category — SaaS-enabled marketplaces built around human capital, said Ian Hathaway, a Bean investor and co-founder of Far Out Venture Capital, in a statement.
