Pipe, a company that has built a trading platform for recurring revenues, is bolstering its sales and engineering departments with several new hires that come from the fintech giant Stripe and Kabbage, an automated lending platform for small businesses.
Pipe has tapped Usman Masood to lead its engineering team, he was previously an engineering manager at Stripe. The company also appointed Noel Hillman as VP of Sales, and Hillman formerly served as Kabbage’s head of sales and operations. Hillman helped Kabbage grow from $300 million in loan originations to $3 billion.
Hillman will oversee the sales team while also managing its Atlanta office, Pipe’s latest “microhub.” Pipe has also hired the original Kabbage sales team, which helped the lending platform scale to over 130,000 small businesses.
Additionally, Pipe has added a number of members from Stripe’s engineering team that helped develop core treasury and bookkeeping platforms. In total, Pipe has hired five folks from Kabbage and three employees from Stripe, Harry Hurst, Pipe Founder and co-CEO told FinLedger.
Pipe’s trading platform provides companies of all sizes access to the capital markets, and works with companies that want to access their booked revenue up front by turning their quarterly or monthly recurring revenue into annual recurring revenue cash flow.
Hurst said that Pipe’s latest $50 million strategic equity funding round drove a massive inflection point and growth curve for the company. However, Hurst said he wants to keep the company’s team relatively small.
“As we grow, we will of course, grow our headcount,” Hurst said. “But, relative to the size of the company our goal is to create one of the highest revenue per employee companies in history. That’s how we think about team building.”
This strategy makes for a healthy business, Hurst went on to explain. If you find the right employees, you can hire “10Xers,” or employees that “can cover 10 times what the average employee would necessarily be able to cover,” he said.
“We’re a technology first company, we like to solve problems with technology, as opposed to just hiring people to try and solve more problems,” Hurst said.
Overall, Pipe has 29 employees and Hurst said that at this stage in the startup’s life, he wants to keep the employee headcount under 50. Going forward, Pipe is looking to double down on its business.
“If you think about the strategic investors from the last [funding] round, thinking about how we can more deeply integrate and partner with them and leverage the strategic nature of their investments, that’s going to be a focus for us over the next few quarters,” he said.
In other recent wealthtech news, trading app Robinhood is seeing the legal heat turn up once again. Massachusetts regulators are attempting to revoke Robinhood’s broker-dealer license alleging that the company’s platform entices inexperienced investors to do risky trades, Reuters reports.