Doola, a company that helps global founders start LLCs in the U.S., raised $8 million in funding even without a Social Security number.
The new investment comes less than a year after the company raised $3 million in seed funding. This brings the company’s total funding to just under $12 million since it was founded in 2020 by Arjun Mahadevan and JP Pincheira. Mahadevan did not disclose the company’s new valuation, but did say that this round increased it.
When we previously wrote about doola in 2021, the New York-based company had just built an MVP and was working with its first paying customer, already used by hundreds of companies to provide EINs (employee identification number) to set up an LLC, U.S. address and bank account, access to U.S. payments, free tax advice, U.S. tax support and phone numbers.
Today, thousands of companies from more than 130 countries have launched doola, which has helped the company grow revenue sevenfold since 2020, Mahadevan told TechCrunch.
Doola is building what he calls a “business in a box” for clients, which has turned into a one-stop solution for compliant company formation, including more education on how to start a business, new banking services and upcoming futures. credit product. Much of that, Mahadevan said, is to help the U.S. Census Project come up with more than 5 million new commercial applications in 2021.
“If we can help people go from zero to one and get their businesses off the ground, we think we can increase entrepreneurship on a global scale and make people with businesses more likely to succeed and achieve product-market fit and scale ,” he added.
Nexus Venture Partners led doola again, with investors including Y Combinator, Hustle Fund, Chris Adelsbach, Sahil Bloom, Alex Cohen, Bart Macdonald and Vibe Capital. They join an existing group of investors including Jacqueline Reses, former head of Square Capital; Dharmesh Shah, founder and CTO of HubSpot; Ankur Nagpal, founder of Teachable and Vibe Capital; Rohini Pandhi, product manager at Square and partner at Transparency Collective ; Arjun Sethi, co-founder and investor of Tribe Capital; Prasanna Sankar, co-founder of Rippling; Translink and Psion Capital.
Mahadevan intends to use the new funding to grow doola’s team, particularly in the areas of product, engineering and research and development. It has offices in New York and Germany and will expand and open new offices. It will also focus on marketing.
Meanwhile, over the past year, the company has launched its own banking service, enabling customers to have a U.S. account and bank remotely from anywhere in the world using physical and virtual credit and debit cards and international wire transfers.
“The ultimate goal is to accept payments,” Mahadevan said. “We are also sitting on this treasure trove of data to understand companies and their performance. We will be able to provide financial services like never before for our customers.”