Orb founders grew so frustrated dealing with billing at Asana, they built their own billing software
Reading Time: 2 minutesBilling might not be something that the average person thinks about on a regular basis. But for companies — particularly those in the business of selling software — it’s massively important. They rely on billing systems to ensure that customers pay on time and have a range of ways to pay.
The trouble is, configuring these systems can eat up valuable engineering time.
Alvaro Morales and Kshiitj Grover know this from experience. Programmers by trade, the pair worked together at Asana, where they were frequently tasked with implementing changes to product packaging and pricing.
‘Unlike all the tools we had access to as developers, billing systems were inflexible and rigid,’ Morales said. ‘We found it super counterintuitive that legacy billing tools didn’t make it easy to evolve pricing over time.’
So Morales and Grover did what many engineers do when hamstrung by frustrating software: built their own.
Called Orb, Morales and Grover’s billing platform is designed to be ‘a single source of truth’ for finance orgs. Orb provides the infrastructure for different types of billing plans, like usage-based and consumption-based plans, as well as workflows for payments and invoicing.
‘We bring together billing and data in a single platform,’ Morales said. ‘Traditional billing tools are far removed from the product, centered around commercial constructs like a ‘subscription’ or ‘contract.’ Orb starts with ingesting raw product usage, and enables our users to define any pricing logic on top of that.’
While Orb has no shortage of rivals in the billing space, business is good, Morales tells me. Orb’s revenue grew close to 5x in the past year, while the company’s customer base tripled to include brands like Vercel, Replit, Pinecone, and Perplexity.
In fact, Orb still has cash in the bank from the Series A round it closed last March. But Morales and Grover couldn’t pass up an opportunity for more.
This week, Orb closed a $25 million Series B round led by Mayfield, bringing Orb’s total raised to $44 million at a ‘significant’ increase in valuation, Morales says, and will be used to build among other features an AI-powered pricing recommendation engine.
‘We’ve found a particularly strong fit in AI, cloud infrastructure, fintech, and dev tools, and have seen most of our growth come from those verticals,’ Morales said. He added that Orb plans to hire around 15 people by the end of the year. The startup currently employs 36, most of whom are San Francisco-based.
Other participants in the round included Basecase, Greylock Partners, Menlo Ventures, Scribble Ventures, South Park Commons, and Uncorrelated Ventures.
Ref: techcrunch
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