Why We Invested in MakersHub
When TTV Capital started investing out of Fund I more than two decades ago, one of our first checks went to René Lacerte and Martin Gates, co-founders of PayCycle. René and Martin saw that small businesses needed an easier, more affordable and – most crucially – paperless way to manage their payroll. PayCycle scaled rapidly and was ultimately sold to Intuit in 2009. By then, René had moved on to start his next venture: Bill.com. TTV saw the market opportunity to help small businesses simplify payments using cloud-based software, and we made our first investment in Bill.com in 2010. Under René’s leadership, the company generated explosive growth, culminating in an IPO in 2019 and a peak market cap of $35B in 2021.
Bill.com was a precursor to MakersHub, a sophisticated accounts payable solution whose most recent funding round we co-led earlier this month.
What Bill.com did for small and mid-sized businesses in the early 2000s, MakersHub is doing in 2024 for the upper end of SMBs – companies with between $5M and $100M in revenue.
Bill.com enabled SMBs to pay their bills and keep their books in the cloud, rather than relying on desktop software. Today, the vast majority of companies rely on cloud-based accounts payable software to manage invoicing and payments; what Bill.com pioneered is now mainstream. But those in specialized industries like manufacturing and construction, for example – where invoicing requires indexing thousands of individual pieces and custom parts – need a solution that aligns with their unique business needs.
Phong Ngo experienced financial operations challenges firsthand as president of General Plasma, a leading supplier of nanotechnology equipment and industrial automation solutions. He and his team engineered and manufactured more than $100 million of advanced R&D and production equipment globally for OEMs in solar, automotive, display and semiconductors. But he also spent countless hours on the tedious but necessary processes of providing quotes, managing the status of orders, and processing payments. He knew his time would be better spent on running the business, rather than digging through miscoded line items. Like so many other entrepreneurs, the solution was clear: Phong wanted to build the software that he wished he had when he was running General Plasma.
In 2021, Phong teamed up with Charley Howe, who he met through The Wharton School’s Executive MBA program. Charley brings nearly two decades of Wall Street experience in fixed-income structured products and venture capital, including time at Citi Ventures, where he focused on early and growth-stage startups in payments, lending, and capital markets. Phong’s deep industry experience coupled with Charley’s business acumen impressed all of us at TTV Capital. We made our first investment as lead investor in MakersHub’s seed round in 2022 and recently co-led the company’s seed extension round.
MakersHub is a comprehensive, end-to-end accounts payable and business intelligence solution that uses proprietary computer vision technology (“WiseVision”) to capture bill and receipt data and sync it to Quickbooks. Capturing bill data and coding it to the right customer and job is mission-critical for forecasting and job profitability tracking, but the process has historically been error-prone and time-consuming. MakersHub completes accounts payable operations in one-tenth the time, saving its customers more than eight hours per week, on average. Further, the software offers approval and authorization flows so team members can sign off on orders and payments, plus a deep integration with QuickBooks that automates bill, payment, item, and vendor record creation to ensure that bill data is coded in the right way every time.
MakersHub is a great example of a next-generation investment for TTV. The company has amassed more than 200 paying customers and grown a network of several thousand payees. To date, MakersHub is experiencing more than 10x year-to-date growth on nearly every commercial metric it tracks. We’re proud to continue to support Phong, Charley, and the entire team at MakersHub as they make accounts payable more efficient – and perhaps even more enjoyable.n nearly every commercial metric it tracks. We’re proud to continue to support Phong, Charley, and the entire team at MakersHub as they make accounts payable more efficient – and perhaps even more enjoyable.
