09-20-2015

Our Investment in AvidXchange

by Brad Feld

We are pleased to announce that we have completed an investment in AvidXchange. Based in Charlotte, NC. AvidXchange (Avid) is a leading mid-market B2B payments provider with a complete invoice workflow management solution, enabling its customers to seamlessly handle invoice ingestion and payments to their respective suppliers.

Avid was founded in 2000 and is run by Mike Praeger, a long time friend of Brad’s from when they both lived in Boston in the 1990s. Mike had several entrepreneurial successes before starting Avid and has grown it in the past 15 years to a substantial company on a modest amount of invested capital.

In April, Mike approached Brad about joining his board as part of a growth investment being led by Bain Capital Ventures. Brad provided some advice on the deal but declined joining the board since we weren’t an investor in the company. After several additional conversations, Mike asked if we would be willing to invest if Bain would syndicate some of their investment to us. After a number of discussions, including with members of our advisory board, Matt Harris at Bain (with whom Seth has a long standing relationship), and Mike, we decided to pursue an investment in the business.

Avid offers its customers solutions to ingest invoices of any form and connect to over 100+ ERP/Accounting systems. Through their software, Avid helps their clients analyze their spend and efficiently pay suppliers on the AvidPay network. Avid’s software enables customers to make a paper-intensive 10-day-long process become completely paperless. As a result, the customer’s payment process will take less than three days days at 50% of the cost. AvidPay enables their customers to pay without doing any work onboarding suppliers (Avid handles all of this), monitor payments across all channels, and receive incentive rebates for using electronic payment methods.

Avid is a fascinating example of a large company, growing extremely quickly, that is hidden in plain sight. As the fastest growing technology company in North Carolina, it’s on track to be a very important payment intermediary in the overall financial infrastructure.

When we raised Foundry Group Select, our strategy was to only invest in companies that we already had an investment in. Avid is an exception to this and one we considered carefully. After talking to our full advisory board and receiving unanimous approval to do this investment, we decided to move forward with it.

We are excited about the chance to work with Mike and his team as they navigate the next wave of growth.