Today, we're excited to announce our $9 million in Series A funding led by Level Equity with participation from Fathom Capital and existing investor Blackbird Ventures, bringing our total funds raised to date to $11 million. In addition, today we also announced the launch of a new product category, Service Operations Automation, or ServOps, (now known as client work management) as well as the release of a brand new module to enable anyone running a service business or team to see what's going on in their business - today, in the past, and in the future - from a single screen.
This new investment builds on an exceptional year at Accelo, where we experienced 120% increase in user growth and record levels of user engagement. Our platform is now used by thousands of small and medium service businesses worldwide, who use the solution to manage client service operations, including sales, quotes, projects, tickets, retainers, timesheets, billing, and scheduling - all from one place, on one platform. On the engagement front, more than 80% of our monthly users use the platform daily, and the average user spends more than an hour each day in the platform.
While we've been able to grow Accelo profitably to thousands of clients, this new funding will help us bring ServOps to the millions of businesses and teams more quickly. Given professionals across the US alone spend more than 40 billion hours a year working in the professional service sector, the sooner we can streamline operations and let them focus on doing the work they love, the better.
“With a combination of deep experience in technology, design, and services, Accelo is well-positioned to pioneer the new Service Operations Automation category,” said George McCulloch, Partner at Level Equity and new member of Accelo's board of directors. “The company’s contrarian approach of delivering an integrated system for running the most important parts of a business, rather than just another tool, is clearly paying off.”
In conjunction with this funding, we're also announcing the creation of a new category of business productivity software - Service Operations Automation, or ServOps for short.
Since the Great Recession, professional service businesses employ more than one in six private-sector employees and are responsible for 28% of jobs created in the US alone. These businesses and teams - including agencies, accountants, architects, consultants, designers, engineers, IT and many more - have unique operating challenges that have been largely ignored by the technology industry to date. While technology has helped people work faster and more productively, it hasn't made it easier to manage business operations.
The ubiquity of the cloud has created an opening for a new category of technology, ServOps, which runs the delivery and operations function of a service business or team. ServOps is optimized to meet the specific needs of service businesses and brings together client management, sales & quoting, project management, service tickets, retainers, timesheets, expenses, and purchases & invoicing into one integrated platform to run all of your client facing, revenue-generating work, and service operations.
I learned first hand how hard it is to build a successful service business, and it used to drive me crazy that I felt like most of the time I was driving blind. On any given day, I couldn't tell who was productive or which client projects were profitable. The only technologies available were clunky, hard to use legacy systems or operated in silos, which didn't help me manage the business as a whole. We created Accelo to solve those challenges and with ServOps, we're working and fulfilling the promise of this new category.
NOTE: Accelo no longer uses ServOps and is now categorized as a client work management platform.
