doolaa company that helps global founders start a limited liability company in the United States, even without a Social Security number, has raised an $8 million funding round.
The new investment comes less than a year after the company raised $3 million in seed funding. This gives the company just under $12 million in total funding since the company was founded in 2020 by Arjun Mahadevan and JP Pincheira. Mahadevan did not disclose the company’s new valuation, but said this round raised it.
When we wrote about doola earlier in 2021, the New York-based company had just built its MVP and was working with its first paying customer, and hundreds of companies had formed LLCs using its software that provides things like an EIN (Employee Identification Number), a US address and bank account, access to US payments, free tax advice, US tax support and a phone number.
Today, thousands of companies from more than 130 countries have now launched doola, which has helped the company increase its revenue growth seven times since 2020, Mahadevan told londonbusinessblog.com.
Doola is building what he said customers call “business in a box,” which has evolved into an all-in-one solution for building a business compliant, including more education on how to start a business, a new banking offering, and a soon to come credit product. Much of it is intended to support the US Census project of more than 5 million new business applications made in 2021, Mahadevan said.
“If we can help people go from zero to point one and get their businesses off the ground, we think we can increase entrepreneurship globally and make it more likely that people can succeed with businesses and make a product-market adaptation.” and scale,” he added. .
Nexus Venture Partners again led the investment in doola and was joined by investors including Y Combinator, Hustle Fund, Chris Adelsbach, Sahil Bloom, Alex Cohen, Bart Macdonald and Vibe Capital. They join a group of existing investors, including Jacqueline Reses, former head of Square Capital; Dharmesh Shah, Founder and CTO at HubSpot; Ankur Nagpal, founder of Teachable and Vibe Capital; Rohini Pandhi, Product Manager at Square and Partner at Transparent Collective; Arjun Sethi, co-founder and investor at Tribe Capital; Prasanna Sankar, co-founder of Rippling; Translink and Psion Capital.
Mahadevan plans to use the new funding to grow doola’s team, particularly in the areas of product, engineering and R&D. It has offices in New York and Germany and will scale these up and open new offices. It will also focus on marketing.
Meanwhile, last year the company launched its own banking service, which allows customers to have a US-based account and do remote banking from anywhere in the world using physical and virtual credit and debit cards and international transfers.
“The ultimate goal is to accept payments,” Mahadevan said. “We are also sitting on this wealth of data with insight into companies and how they are performing. We are going to think for customers and provide financial services that we have never had before.”