BillGuard has raised $10 Million in their Series B round of financing. Investors include bigtime funds like Khosla Ventures, Peter Thiel’s Founder’s Fund, Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors; previous investors Bessemer Venture Partners and IA Ventures also contributed to this round. The eye catching part of this round is BillGuard’s CEO Yaron Samid‘s claim that he had to turn down dozens of VCs who wanted a part of the deal.
“Most of the time you’re out there begging for money. We had a very competitive round,” says Samid. He chalks this up to absolute focus on product quality. His message to entrepreneurs is: if you build it well, they will come. Make something useful and easy to use, and people and investors won’t have a choice but to use your service. Billguard claims to have saved its users over $500,000 in its first 6 months of operation.
As simple as entering your online banking username and password on their bank-level AES 256-bit, BillGuard gives you an instant overview of various risks associated with your accounts. What makes BillGuard run so well and in scale is their use of crowdsourcing to judge the quality of charges to your account. By collecting responses from other users, they can warn you about suspicious charges on your account. This, along with a very user-friendly interface, has made BillGuard an instant success, among users and among investors.
BillGuard is a free service that ‘alerts you to hidden charges, billing errors, misleading subscriptions, scams and fraud on your credit cards.’ The company does not charge money to users, but charges banks for the service; some of these banks pass on the fees to their customers.
Watch Yaron’s 7 minute video demo of BillGuard at Finnovate, where the company won the Audience Favorite award.
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