Featured Pitch: Expensify–making the expense report less tedious

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By Editor December 1, 2010

Expensify logo 

Company: Expensify

Website: www.expensify.com

Headquarters: San Francisco

Year Founded: 2008

Founder: David Barrett

Investors: Hillsven Capital, Baseline Ventures, Red Swoosh founder Travis Kalanick, Redpoint Ventures

Employees: 8

Company Description: Expense reports that don’t suck!

By David Barrett, Founder

Product Overview

Expensify does “expense reports that don’t suck!”  We do that by importing expenses *and receipts* from your credit cards and mobile phones (so no typing or paper receipts), submitting expense reports through email (so no printouts or envelopes), and reimbursing through QuickBooks and direct deposit (so no manual bookkeeping or physical checks).

Founder’s Story

I’ve been programming since I was 6 years old.  Throughout middle and high school I got into computer graphics, eventually going into the virtual reality lab at the University of Michigan and then into 3D graphics engines at a small company in Texas.  That company’s total failure was a great lesson that technology is rarely the problem: most products fail because they just don’t solve an important problem, or the team building the solution doesn’t agree what it is and thus never does it right.  So I went into technical writing and project management for a while (with the notion that “C++ is a great language, but English is even better”), took a year off to travel the world, and then ultimately got into the P2P software world.  I joined a startup called Red Swoosh, it was acquired by Akamai, and I left a year later to start Expensify.

Employees

Eight awesome folk.  Me, six programmers, and one business.  We work hard and have an awesome time, just recently returning from our annual month-long off-site, where we were coding during a super typhoon!

Business Model

It’s always free to track your expenses and submit reports, and it’s free to approve reports from two submitters per month, but it costs $5 per submitter per month for each additional submitter.  So if you have 10 people in your company, three of whom submit expense reports, that month costs $5.

Current Needs (if you are currently looking for new employees, looking to raise another round of capital, etc.)

Hiring!  If you are looking (or know anyone who is) please check out our job page at http://expensify.com/jobs – we’re looking for awesome generalists, ideally right out of school.

Expensify – www.expensify.com