At the beginning of this year, SnapRefund had yet to secure its first client. In the months since, the Philadelphia startup has been asked to join an accelerator with a less than 2% acceptance rate, seen its branding on a billboard in Times Square, and built a growing roster of clients.
SnapRefund, founded by Anis Taylor and Cody Eddings in 2019, is nearing the finish of the 12-week Techstars Boulder summer accelerator. It is Techstars' original and flagship accelerator, and SnapRefund is one of a dozen startups in the current cohort. The 4-year-old startup is a digital payment platform for insurance businesses that helps streamline the claims process for their teams and customers. Taylor and Eddings feel that the acclaimed accelerator is giving them the tools to ramp up growth, with the company currently nearing the close of a pre-seed funding round.
SnapRefund has added its first three clients in recent months, driving a 3,000% revenue spike from July to August. Eddings and Taylor did not disclose a target amount for their pre-seed round, but Eddings said "a good bit is collected" and they hope to close the round in the fourth quarter. It's still early for the startup, but Eddings and Taylor are beginning to see the fruits of years of labor that largely involved back-end work to ready a platform before clients and revenue began to materialize. Now, Taylor says SnapRefund is more than an idea, "it's alive" and looking to grow.
"[Growth] has been exponential," Taylor said. "Our vision, we see it happening in real time. That's really been one of the things that's been a pure joy with building a business, especially this year."
Taylor and Eddings both have come a long way to get to Philadelphia and have embraced the city's mentality. They say they are bringing "the blue collar aspect of Philadelphia into the white collar space that is fintech."
Taylor was born on an Air Force base in the Philippines and spent his formative years in Guam. He moved to Philadelphia at 17 to attend Philadelphia Christian Academy before going to Bethune-Cookman to play Division I college basketball. Eddings is a St. Louis native who wound up in the Philadelphia area after receiving a computer engineering degree from Lehigh University. Both had been founding members of two startups prior to SnapRefund and met at a pitch workshop. The two shared stories about a lack of access to financial literacy resources growing up and decided to build the financial technology to simplify the process for handling insurance claims.
It's been a winding journey for both Eddings and Taylor, one that most recently brought them to the pinnacle of advertising placement with the Times Square billboard. Through the accelerator, SnapRefund worked with financial service company Brex to put up the digital ad in New York.
"Our biggest way of growth that we've been focusing on since we've started this has been organic growth and just how can we really maximize our brand visibility utilizing marketing," Taylor said. The duo estimated they had between 15,000 and 20,000 social media impressions after posting about the billboard, not to mention the millions of eyes it drew plastered above one of the nation's busiest intersections.
Eddings and Taylor hope the accelerator will be a catalyst for growth. The 196 companies that have gone through Techstars Boulder have collectively raised more than $2 billion since the accelerator's launch in 2007.
Eddings said the goal for SnapRefund is to have at least 10 clients by the end of 2024 with annual recurring revenue of $1 million by the start of 2025. The founders are invested in planting roots and growing in Philadelphia, and they see a lot of untapped potential for new clients and new investors alike.
"We really want to build our partnership base in Philadelphia, we really want to build it in Pennsylvania. ... We're here," Taylor said. "For us, it's really important that if we can get that message out there and get the clients on board and [they] just give us a chance, grow with us, I think that there's something that we can do really special in Philadelphia."
