Last month, Vsimple — a local tech startup based out of Southern Indiana — raised a collective $4.7 million from investors, according to two Form D filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
But you will not find co-founder and CEO Buddy Bockweg celebrating.
“We are very passionate and proud about the people who have invested in our business. Hands down. No question, but that is just the beginning, right? That’s just giving us this ability to go out and actually accomplish what it is that we want to accomplish,” said Bockweg of his business-to-business (B2B) Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) workflow management platform.
I recently spoke with Bockweg to see what he and his team at Vsimple — short for “very simple” — have been up to since being named as one of our Startups to Watch in 2022 in January from that year.
“We’re trying to reduce complexity in most organizations,” he said, offering a very simple definition of this company’s mission.
What is interesting to note from Vsimple’s most recent money raise, which began in late summer of 2022, was the names of the investors themselves, some of whom are clients of the company.
“These people really believe in what we’re building … Not only do they derive the value from our platform, it becomes this really unique point for us to be able to kind of say, ‘We did this purposefully …. Let’s make sure that we are not beholden to whatever is going on in the climate of venture capital,” Bockweg said.
Bockweg said that spanning from Jan. 2022 to now, Vsimple has a 900% increase in booked revenue, adding that his company has exceeded seven figures since the end of 2022.
During that time, Vsimple expanded from its initial target customers in the construction, equipment distribution, and manufacturing industries into the realm of accounting and professional services firms.
Bockweg highlighted one client in particular, Blue & Co., a local firm that has offices throughout the Kentuckiana region, that has been using Vsimple’s platform for tax and audit workflows.
As company’s have had to deal with the current rough economics and uncertain markets, that turbulent climate — resulting in a reduction of cost basis — has worked in favor of Vsimple’s product offerings.
“It’s this push to digitize the operations of an organization,” Bockweg said of the trend that has helped propel his company’s growth. “The work still remains, and so how do I do it more efficiently, more productively, with better visibility and better accountability?”
Currently the company has a little less than 100 clients, ranging from small- to medium-sized businesses to publicly traded companies.
“The growth is fantastic. The opportunities are endless, but what we’re most proud of is the way that we physically take care of our clients,” Bockweg said.
He added that his company’s net revenue retention (NRR) — a SaaS metric that measures recurring revenue from existing customers over a given time period — has been 160% over the last two years, placing them within the top 1% of the list of B2B SaaS operations.
For reference, a NRR more than 100% is considered to be good.
Since its founding in 2020, the company has been headquartered in New Albany, Indiana, at 318 E. 4th St. It currently has 11 full-time employees with nine based out of New Albany and two at a small office in Lexington, Kentucky. In addition, Vsimple has nine other team members working on contracts in other parts of the country.
Vsimlple’s founders — Bockweg, Elia Tautua, Gary Criscillis and Henry Lynch — originally worked at AxisPoint Alliance, a distribution business, where Bockweg served as the CEO for a year before Vsimple was launched.
Going forward, Vsimple users can expect to see a couple of new time-saving features, including the ability to have physical signatures “baked in to the workflow” and as well as an AI-technology that can read, parse and input data into the platform based on the user’s emails.
