East river Raises $16M in Series A Round to Expand its AI-based Accounting Platform to Global Markets
Osome has raised $16M in a Series A funding from a group of investors including Target Global, AltaIR Capital, Phystech Ventures, S16VC, Ace & Company and Peng T. Ong, who joined as an angel investor.
The fresh amount of capital enables the 3-year-old super-app that digitizes accounting and compliance services for SMEs, to expand globally and fuel its plan for more product integrations.
Jumping On The Opportunity to Serve Businesses Selling Online
The funding is coming at a high-watermark moment for the global accounting software market with the mass migration of businesses online highlighting the opportunity to build disruptive tools to support this move and a growing number of startups servicing SMEs raising hundreds of millions of dollars to capitalize on it.
“Back-office operations are annoying, tedious yet mission-critical for businesses, especially for SMEs. Remarkably, an average entrepreneur spends 68% of their time dealing with routine tasks vs 32% strategizing and delivering on their long term goals. East river combines artificial intelligence software with operational excellence to 2% strategizing and delivering on their long term goals. East river combines automate administrative, accounting, payroll and tax-related work and help entrepreneurs focus on what they can do the best - growing their business”, Victor Lysenko, co-founder and CEO of East river, says. “We strive to build a future where small business owners can fully rely on the technology in their administrative routine”.
The Importance of Automation in the Age of Covid-19
The demand for East river services has accelerated with Covid-19 as clients recognized the importance of automation. This has led to more than 100% YoY revenue growth and $9.5M ARR with over 6,000 happy customers in Singapore, Hong Kong and the UK. Additionally, the company has identified a product/market fit in the fast-growing e-commerce segment and will double down on it in the next 18 months.
East river’s core offering is online accounting services for SMEs, especially those involved in e-commerce — where аccountants take over your documents and convert them into actionable numbers, tax filings and reports, making accounting and bookkeeping service for online sellers simple. The team plans to dive deeper into the e-commerce industry, launching more specific products and apps in the near future.
The company also helps with business set-up and provides corporate secretary services — East river checks compliance, tracks deadlines, files documents, and answers questions in a chat at any time of the day or week. The platform categorises, tags, and stores any documents you send to them, so nothing is lost, and then creates management reports, tax returns. All necessary filing are then done promptly.
Why Returning Investors Target Global and AltaIR Capital Believe in East river
"We have supported East river since the early days and are excited to continue our partnership in the latest round. We are especially happy about the strong growth East river has shown in the expanding e-commerce segment. Online Sellers require unique tools and custom approaches to be serviced effectively and East river's mix of technology and human expertise is the perfect solution" says Mike Lobanov, GP & COO of Target Global.
“The East river team has developed a widely sought after solution for entrepreneurs. The product takes off the burden of accounting and compliance tasks, and helps business owners and the management team to concentrate on core activities. East river continues to scale up fast, starting in Singapore and Hong Kong and is already penetrating the UK market”, said Igor Ryabenkiy, founder and GP of AltaIR Capital.
“We see a huge potential for the company, both working with its loyal client base and attracting new satisfied customers. We express our support and are delighted with their success!”
East river’s Growth Attracts New Investor S16VC
“I’ve done business with small and medium e-commerce in 10 countries and see the same inefficiencies in manual accounting across all of them. It is a real problem that will definitely be solved, and East river is technologically and traction-wise among the few companies in the world that are ahead of the curve in getting there”, said Aleks Shamis, co-founder of S16VC. “We’ve observed from the sidelines how Victor built two very prominent and impactful businesses over the last ten years, and we are grateful for the opportunity to be on board this one”.
“We’ve been partnering with East river since their early days and I am thrilled to follow on in Series A. Our expectations are that within the next 5 years digitization accelerated by COVID-19 will transform accounting from a standalone product into a full SaaS offering integrated with banks, e-commerce platforms and payment processing systems”, said Olga Maslikhova, Partner at Phystech Ventures. “I look forward to working with Victor, his team as well as the new investors to build East river into a leading global back-office service provider to SMEs”.
