Swiftly growing fintech Pipe, a company that has built a trading platform for recurring revenues, has announced its global expansion starting with the UK. To aid in its international development, Pipe also released it has hired two industry veterans from Hubspot and Stripe.
Pipe’s tech ties directly to a company’s financial platforms, and based on the predictability of the cash flows, it will price contracts and allow companies to sell recurring revenue for capital. The platform assesses key metrics by integrating with a company’s financial systems and instantly rate the performance on the business to qualify them for a trading limit.
Essentially, it turns monthly recurring revenue in to annual recurring revenue to help SaaS companies grow without diluting their current cap table.
The platform has seen aggressive growth since its initial $6 million seed round in Feb. 2020. By May of 2021 it closed on a $250 million round that set the company at a $2 billion dollar valuation, according to Harry Hurst, co-founder and co-CEO of Pipe. This is on top of a $50 million “strategic equity funding” raise in March from notable investors at Social Capital, Shopify, Hubspot and Next47.
Hurst, who’s background lies in computer science, left the UK for the United States seven years ago as it provided the best funding environment to build his first technology company. Now, he is thankful he can bring that tech back to where it all began.
“If Pipe existed a decade ago and offered company friendly financing options, I might never have left the UK,“ Hurst said.
In an interview with FinLedger, Hurst said international scale was always the goal and saw interest from UK based companies since Pipe’s inception. Integration was built specifically for the UK with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliance in mind.
“Because it turns out a lot of UK companies actually sell to US companies and have US dollar denominated contracts as well. We’re not strangers to it, however, this launch allows for the ability to trade natively. So now, you can connect you systems in the UK,” Hurst told FinLedger.
Hurst attributed its US based success as a leading factor in its ability to plant roots over seas. In the first nine months of the year, Pipe’s trading platform saw rapid US adoption – over 8,000 companies have signed up on the Pipe trading platform with over 50% of the trading volume coming from non-SaaS vertical markets including direct-to-consumer (D2C) subscription, property management, streaming services and service-based businesses.
To support the move to the UK, Pipe has brought on two heavy-hitters: Brad Coffey, former chief strategy officer at Hubspot and one of its original employees to lead as Pipe’s chief customer officer And Sid Orlando, former editor-in-chief at fintech giant Stripe and manager of curation and content at Kickstarter. Orlando will take the helm of content curation at Pipe.
“Aside from SaaS, Brad has built a horizontal business. HubSpot is focused on helping companies to grow through providing software to optimize that funnel and their marketing spend, and that is horizontal across so many different industries, right. So Brad’s got incredible go to market and product experience dealing with customer bases that are split up into verticals across many different sectors,” Hurst said.
As for Orlando, Hurst said she will aid in Pipe’s goal to build one of the world’s largest repositories of entrepreneur, founder focus content, that’s “really going to lay the foundation for them to be able to improve their outcomes,” and increase awareness of alternative ways they can scale.
