As it helps software companies process payments, Boulder startup Tilled has brought on an $11 million Series A round to rapidly accelerate the growth of its team and expand internationally.
The company, which was founded in 2019 by Caleb Avery, helps software companies make money off of the payments they process. Tilled’s solution allows its clients to operate like their own fully registered payment facilitator, giving them the ability to monetize their payments and keep 66% of that revenue share.
When working with services like Stripe, companies are typically charged a standard fee of 2.9% and 30 cents per successful card charge. Instead of charging for the processing fees, Tilled shares the profits with its customers.
As interest grew during the last year, Avery said the biggest differentiation for Tilled’s new customers was the solution’s ease of implementation.
“The fact that they can get up in running with us in a couple weeks, while most of our competitors are a four- to six-month implementation timeframe, I think that’s been the single biggest thing that’s setting us apart,” he said.
While Tilled's initial target customer was software startups, Avery said the company has seen a number of larger players come onto the platform.
“We were primarily thinking we’d be focusing on startups and smaller businesses,” he said of the company’s strategy earlier in 2021. “Since then, we’ve had several companies processing well over a billion dollars in payments working with us. It’s incredibly exciting to see how many very large companies are interested in our payfac-as-a-service solution."
With that growing customer base, Tilled was ready to bring on this round of funding to accelerate its mission.
The round was led by Rebecca Lynn from Canvas Ventures and joined by Abhinav Tiwari, former head of investments and M&A at Stripe, Henry Ward, founder and CEO at Carta, and existing Tilled investors including Abstract Ventures, Peterson Ventures and Clocktower Technology Group.
Both Lynn and Tiwari joined Tilled's board of directors following this round.
"Until now, monetizing payments came at a cost of either sacrificing significant economics for customer experience or undertaking the onerous, heavy lift of becoming a PayFac," Tiwari said in a statement. "Tilled is pioneering a new movement to help software companies build, own and monetize payments without having to deal with expensive customer and pricing trade-offs.”
Tilled, which has 15 employees, is expecting to grow its team to 50 employees by the end of 2021, as the proceeds of this round are largely focused on boosting headcount, Avery said. The company is currently hiring in Boulder and remotely across its sales, marketing, engineering, implementation and customer support departments.
In addition to hiring, Avery said this round would help Tilled look internationally. Now, the company helps process payments in the U.S. and Canada, and plans to expand into the U.K. and E.U. later this year.
“This capital gives us the budget to make a realistic push into those international markets and do it the correct way,” Avery said.
