Ignition announces our Series A Capital Raise of A$5m

It’s been almost a year in the making, but I’m pleased to announce that Ignition has closed our Series A capital raising! This round brings A$5m in new capital so that we can better take care of our customers and their clients.

This article will showcase who has backed us in this Series A fundraising round. In short, it’s Australia’s best and brightest B2B Venture Capital firms adding to our cornerstone shareholders.

We’re proud to have Adrian Di Marco (founder/chairman of ASX: Technology One) and Howard Leibman (Founder of Equity Ventures) join our board and help ensure we keep our eyes on building the best company we can. Their experience will be invaluable.

Reflection - why does Ignition exist?

In times like this that it is important to reiterate who Ignition is and why we, as a company, exist. So, let’s take a trip down memory lane so that we may help shed some light on Ignition, as we are not purely an app for managing engagement letters - we are, and will be, much, much more.

You can read more about the Ignition journey later on my personal blog that's firing back up.

Ignition was started to improve the relationship between a small business and their advisor. The app was built to achieve better outcomes for the small business, and allow the advisor to run their business more efficiently so that they could focus more time on their clients.

In order to do this Ignition:

1. Provides a robust contract engine with connections to workflow, invoicing, and payments. This allows a very accurate and real “source of truth” for our customers and the relationships they have with their clients.

2. Allows firms to use the segmentation of the data provided from their engagements to better understand their clients, how their firm runs, and to best communicate with their customers.

3. Runs your practice in the best way possible, allowing you to focus on your clients.

So, where to from here?

In the past 12 months, we’ve been slowly growing our team and building behind-the-scenes infrastructure, to ensure we have the right systems in place to continually serve you better.

The areas we are doubling down in the next 12 months are education, product, development and customer success.

Key areas of focus will be:

Payments

We are now processing the exchange of $100s of millions between small businesses and their accountants, and removing the need for debtors.

Our plan is to enable payments in all regions we service customers while making them more accessible.

Data, data, data

We want you to be able to understand how your practice runs and subsequently make the changes you want to build your practice.

Integrations and API

We will be doubling down on our integrations with key ledger partners around the world. To make them tighter behind the scenes, we have commenced work on an open API so that you can connect all of your favourite tools.

Flows

This is our little secret project. Without revealing anything, we are working on the ability for you to use the smart segmented data gathered in Ignition to communicate better and make the most out of the sophisticated contract engine we’ve built.

Other areas

Documents, Templates, signing are all things we’re looking at expanding. We’d love to see the use case of what you’d like to see, so that we can plot, plan, and deliver the best possible experience.

What we need from you

We will be collecting more and more information from you, our customers with surveys on what you use currently, and on how you run your firm, in order to make sure we build things you need and love, and even some things you never knew you always wanted (Steve Jobs style).

Shout outs

Big shout outs to our customers, our partners in the market, our families, our investors, and my amazing team at Ignition. This wouldn’t be possible without all of you. Special mentions to my family for having my back throughout this journey to date, and to Dane, for joining Ignition when it was still a seemingly impossible task to grow the business, and for being a co-founder most people only wish for from day 1.

Much love, let’s change the accounting industry and move onwards to build better relationships with our clients.

We are building something special, and we are so happy you’re along for the journey.

Onwards and Upwards,

Guy